Systems, methods, and devices are provided for temporal filtering of tone mapping slopes used in adjusting the power consumed by a backlight of an electronic display. One such method involves computing a current first target slope of an intermediate tone mapping function based at least in part on characteristics of a current image frame and temporally filtering the current first target slope to obtain a current first transition slope. A current backlight intensity of the display and a current final tone mapping function may be determined based at least in part on the current first transition slope. The current final tone mapping function may be applied to the current image frame or a subsequent image frame.