Digital Light & Color

If chosen well, several preset color schemes could be good. Whatever you do, please by sympathetic to aged eyes! In order to comfortably read the menu items in the Menu bar, drop downs, Quick Pick, Thumbnails, main image, but probably not in the transformation windows I need the contrast to be as high as possible, either black on white or white on black. I have played with a wide variety of combinations of border color and background color, and I am unable to find one that I consider to be friendly.

For what it's worth the scheme that works for me is:

Workspace Color = 25% grey
Border Color = 50.2% gray

Not only is the screen toned down this way, limiting bright distractions around the preview, but also Menu bar and Quick Pick items have some 75% of maximum contrast (which is easily readable but doesn't interfere with vision as if the background of say Quick Pick would suddenly become white), and the Preview image is shown against middle gray (which is quite useful in itself), but it can be quickly switched to pure white or black with menu buttons.

A win-win situation.

@Robert: what would you suggest for a well-chosen preset instead?

For me, it would be good to have the text in Menu bar, drop downs, and Quick Pick put black text on a white background. Less good, but also workable would be white text on a black background. Control of border and background could remain as they are now. Because the menu bar is relatively small, the amount of white in it does not interfere with viewing the main image. White in drop downs and Quick pick does not cause a problem viewing the main image because because these disappear the instant you make a choice. In summary, for me it is important to maximize text readability without putting too much white on the screen when I want to examine the main image.

Have you tried to set the Border Color in preferences to 50.6% (this way the image title will be black not white as for 50.2%) and the Workspace color to either 25% or less or pure black? This way you will have white text on either v. dark grey or black for menu bar and quick pick buttons. The menu drop-downs are controlled by Windows and are already black text on white.

Tomczak, thank you! That combination is better than any that I found. For me it is workable, and I'll stop fussing.

The next release will have a comprehensive set of options for defining themes so you can customize almost anything, and switch between different sets of colors.