Re: [Gimp-user] Dark Theme for GIMP?

[Steve Kinney <admin pilobilus net>]

On 05/11/2013 07:29 AM, Jehan Pagès wrote:

[ ... ]

> This is why I am wondering about this passage to dark themes for
> software UI now. Even though you work on visual content, you still
> have menu/tool texts, icons, information texts and boxes, etc. And if
> you stay on this UI for hours every day, I really wonder about the
> good or bad of light on dark background. Or else are all the web UI
> thoughts about not overusing dark backgrounds wrong?

Our perception of color and brightness are powerfully altered by the
color and brightness of adjacent regions.  This well known optical
illusion illustrates the principle:

http://tinyurl.com/ypux5

On a screen display, a gray background at about 50% brightness has
the smallest relative impact on how we see a hypothetical "average"
image displayed against it.  The most important factor in this
context is the canvas padding and window decorations that surround
the image in progress; toolbox icons and such are far enough away
that they only need a matching "dark theme" to reduce distraction
if/as necessary.

One of the first things I do when setting up a GIMP installation is
set a custom canvas padding color right in the middle of unsaturated
gray.  However, when working on images for web pages, I often reset
the canvas padding to the background color of the page where the
image will be displayed.

For reading text, I think black on white is nearly as hard on the
eyes as white on black.  The GIMP website design agrees with my
information on this subject:  In addition to the neutral gray
background, the GIMP site's text boxes (div class "note") have a
light, low saturation background color (#ddffcc) that is a little on
the blue side of green.  I generally use something even less
saturated, for instance the background of the main container div on
my text-heavy personal site is #f9ffff.  This all goes back to
studies done in the 1960s on workplace ergonomics; the hypothetical
ideal background for reading black text was found to be somewhere
around #cfe3de.  I set a similar background color for text display
areas in desktop themes.  I do a lot of reading and typing, and it
seems to reduce eyestrain.

We might take it for granted that "desktop wallpaper" is supposed to
be very distracting i.e. artistic, humorous, etc.  But here's one I
made for purely practical reasons:

http://pilobilus.net/xfer/desktop-tile.jpg

It's a neutral gray texture that offers "zero distraction" and high
contrast for anything on the desktop that is not itself black or
gray, but provides a visually 'tactile' surface that makes the eye
focus sharply on the plane of the screen.

:o)

Steve