I’m trying to make a rough and ready light theme, as I find dark themes very unpleasant to use.
So for starters I’ve just taken the default theme and inverted all the colours (e.g. #3E3E3E → #C1C1C1).
This produces a basically usable colour scheme but the icons (e.g. on the tab bar, and all the on/off switches) have very little contrast. It’s not clear to me where these are set, can anybody explain where to set them,
Very dirty solution, until setting the iconset in rtimage.cc is re-enabled:
move the Dark directory to Dark-orig and link Light to Dark.
(I know this will cause all sort of problems updating)
For what it’s worth here is the quick and dirty light theme for anyone who wants to use it
https://filebin.net/u8scy6dy7c8yyc5e
(or even better improve it).
Why not set rt to use your system theme, then set your system theme to something pleasing?
I’m not the OP but I miss this option for a while now … since that I’m used to TooWaBlue’s theme
I’ve seen people on DPReview complaining about the lack of a light theme in the (now default) Gtk3 version of RT, so yes it would be nice to have a light theme.
I’ve seen people on DPReview complaining about the curvature of the Earth…
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I thought it is flat…
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2 reasons:
- I can’t see how to set “System theme” in the RT preferences.
- The biggest problem now is the hard-wired use of the “Dark” icons.
A light theme looks nice but it’s not usefull. Your eyes will calibrate on the light colors and your images becomes overexposed, to much contrast and saturation. Even the correct whitebalance is hard to set.
With an average gray your eyes will always be calibrated correct.
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I do complain about that too, it prevents from going on a straight path.
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The path of the righteous is twisted and full of eels. A mercator map might help.
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Actually, system theme is no longer in the menu (at least not if running KDE).
Hello everybody. Sorry to be so late on this. I too am having a hard time with the dark theme. There are lots of reasons to use a light theme. Have always used the system theme before but that box is missing in 5.0-r1-gtk3_WinVista_64 on Windows 7. The only themes in the dropdown are RawTherapee and TooWaBlue, and they are both dark. Going to roll back to 4.2 for now.
—Russell
@TooWaBoo is proposing to add a lighter TooWaBlue theme, it should be available fairly soon in one of the forthcoming dev builds.
What problems would a light theme solve?
The reasons for a light theme are photographic and physiologic.
I use a print workflow with a dim screen (80 cd/m2) and a white background. Viewing images on a dark background makes them look bold and vivid, but this is deceiving; they will not look like that printed and mounted on a white board. If you make them look good on a dim screen with a white background, they will look good printed. (“My prints are too dark!” “No, your screen is too bright.”)
And for photo editing, the theme should consist of neutral colors; vividly colored window elements are distracting, and may distort your evaluation of the image colors. Some people even paint their digital darkrooms gray.
A light screen constricts the iris and improves focus; when your vision starts to go you will understand this. (Presbyopia means “old eyes.”) Light text on a dark background seems to expand and become fuzzy, and is harder to read. If you do a search you will find differences of opinion on this, but note that a significant population is of the clear opinion that a light background is less strain on the eyes. That is why operating systems and so forth provide different choices for theme colors. And the people who say a white background is a strain may be using bright high-temperature factory screen settings, which attract people in showrooms but are terrible for everything else. Note that some recommend a slightly muted or even yellowish background for text on a light theme.
Using the 5.0 RawTherapee theme, I can barely tell whether the clipped highlight and shadow indication buttons are selected, for example, and the light-gray-on-dark-gray text is very hard to read. The TooWaBlue icons are a little better but the text is the same, and the vivid blue sliders and borders are distracting. And these are the only two choices I have; there is no system theme checkbox.
Having said all this, those who like the dark themes are welcome to use them; but please put back the system theme box; and it would not hurt to provide some light neutral themes as well.
Thank you . . . .
In my case much simpler:
- I find it heavy going trying to read light text on a dark screen
- It is quite frankly depressing working with an application that is used maximized when it has a dark background.
Why not simply use a white background around the photo?
That is the exact opposite of what I want – a dark or darkish matte is fine, but light text on dark buttons etc, is a problem.