Dark theme in Pro Tools 2020.11

[rinky]

Had dark mode on for 2 minutes.
Went back to classic!

[The Weed]

See this thread about the "Padding" in Windows.

And here is an article about tweaking colorization settings.

Always back up the Registry before making any changes. And, as always, YMMV.

[blemished]

Originally Posted by Akiz

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0...PT_Eucon_Icons

Get the icon set from the link above. Unzip it. Locate the icon inside the folder, click on it and hit Cmd+C to copy it in the clipboard.

Go to your Applications folder, locate ProTools app, select it and hit CMD+i to open the info window. Click on the icon, top left to select it, then hit CMD+V to paste the new icon, enter your admin password, done!
(same applies for the Eucon icon change).



Cheers!

Thanks so much for this - sooooo much better than the garish kindergarten purple version!

[Neale]

Yeah, being on a Mac with calibrated screens (I use them for video and photography, calibrated with one of the X-Rite thingamajiggers) I’ve got NO complaints about Dark Mode. Maybe some things could be adjusted for TASTE, but as far as FUNCTIONALITY, I’m not missing grid markers, nothing too garish after adjusting colours and saturation within ProTools (although audio regions are super Miami Vice bright... still, the small counter is easier to look at... can’t win ‘em all). I am grateful for the option, don’t have any serious problems with it, and I can always switch back if I want.

Smashing success? I don’t know. But epic fail? Not for me. Pretty good as far as I’m concerned and I’m sticking with it for now.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Neale

Yeah, being on a Mac with calibrated screens (I use them for video and photography, calibrated with one of the X-Rite thingamajiggers) I’ve got NO complaints about Dark Mode. Maybe some things could be adjusted for TASTE, but as far as FUNCTIONALITY, I’m not missing grid markers, nothing too garish after adjusting colours and saturation within ProTools (although audio regions are super Miami Vice bright... still, the small counter is easier to look at... can’t win ‘em all). I am grateful for the option, don’t have any serious problems with it, and I can always switch back if I want.

Smashing success? I don’t know. But epic fail? Not for me. Pretty good as far as I’m concerned and I’m sticking with it for now.

Same here brother. I can see the grid no problem. This and track folders may get me to move on up to 2020.11 from 2019.6 even with the unresolved bugs in the MIDI event list.

[daeron80]

Originally Posted by grayter1

There's definitely a difference between Mac and Windows systems for dark mode.

Always has been a big difference in the way the two systems handle gamma and such. Gen-X gamer geeks who used Windows programs to make custom graphics for Doom constantly struggled with this in the 90s. Or so I've heard...

[Darryl Ramm]

Macs have for a long time now had the same default display gamma (~ 2.2) as Windows

The dark display settings are not great for me on any one of high quality P3 monitors with gamma ~2.2. Carefully calibrated but that should not matter much. The issues for me are the brightness (and maybe excessive color saturation) of the audio waveforms on tracks that you just can't control easilly.

And this is worse for me and I expect other folks who want to use dark mode to operate in much more subdued lighting. If you are in a bright room and just flip to dark mode, sure it looks pretty or maybe just different enough to be pretty for a while. But in a darker room ouch. The day-glo waveform just makes the visibility of the rest of the UI painful to see. Not that I know anything about post, but I wonder how this works for them or if Avid really got feedback from those users. (if so then kudos and I'll shut up as they are the folks who should most need this).

This stuff just looks like somebody's first dark mode attempt. I've worked with a couple of engineering teams who did this in other products and it's surprisingly *not* easy. And they were targeting things like simpler data dashboarding type apps. I've not used Media Composer in years, but I'd hope it's better for viewing in darker viewing critical environments. At least Media composer makes it easy to select a range of UI "brightnesses". Pro Tools should have copied that. And I wish Avid had taken this opportunity to concurrently improve the limited/not very helpful color settings.

[Neale]

Waveforms garish for me, yes. “Painful”? Not CLOSE to painful for me, working in the “almost dark” of a dimmed, warm-white LIFX lamp that is not pointed directly at me and the ugly glow of my Artist Control next to me with its LCD touchscreen. And if I HAD to have something colourful that draws my eye’s attention, well, if I’m recording something, maybe it’s nice that the one thing on the screen that calls my attention is a waveform.

So far, a bit of mixing, but mostly dialogue editing. Again, no accounting for taste, I wish the waveform palette was a little less garish, but it works fine for me - not handicapping editing breaths and mouth noises in the least. Maybe I’ll look at the MIDI editor and see what everyone is bitching about... it will probably be fine for me too.

[Ray Lyon]

I agree, it's garish and hard on the eyes. You can't adjust brightness color of waveforms relative to track color. The Mix window is especially cluttered... the blank bullets in sends and inserts distract, plugins lose their boundaries, metering becomes a jumble, track names are especially hard to read in context with comments and delay comp +/- windows.

When I call up Melodyne the white screen blasts through blazing your eyes.

An improvement would be to have the option to darken just the clip list, or track list, or edit window, but have the choice leave the mixer window alone. Headache inducing. I'll stick to classic for now.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Ray Lyon

I agree, it's garish and hard on the eyes. You can't adjust brightness color of waveforms relative to track color. The Mix window is especially cluttered... the blank bullets in sends and inserts distract, plugins lose their boundaries, metering becomes a jumble, track names are especially hard to read in context with comments and delay comp +/- windows.

When I call up Melodyne the white screen blasts through blazing your eyes.

An improvement would be to have the option to darken just the clip list, or track list, or edit window, but have the choice leave the mixer window alone. Headache inducing. I'll stick to classic for now.

With the exception of the Melodyne window I don't see the problems you're seeing. And you can't blame Avid for the Melodyne white screen. Bitch to Celemony about that.


What do you mean by 'blank bullets in inserts and sends'?


To be honest we never could adjust the brightness of the colors of the waveforms to begin with.