DAZ Studio and dark styles

bytescapes

For a while, I've been frustrated by the difficulty of reading text on the DAZ UI when I use a darker color scheme (I find the standard light schemes too distracting). I finally sat down and figured out what the problem is.

The Base colors include "Background", which more or less sets the tone for the interface; most text will be superimposed on this color. The color of the text itself is set by Foreground. So for a dark scheme, you want a darkish Background, and a lightish Foreground. So far, so good.

There's also Light Color, which is used for de-emphasized text. For example, in hierarchical menus on panels, some categories will be shown in Light Color, while others are shown in Foreground (I haven't quite figured out the logic that governs which is used). For readability on large screens, you're going to want to set Light Color to something pretty bright as well; perhaps a few percent darker than Foreground, just different enough that you can perceive the difference if that information is meaningful to you.

Here's the catch. Light Color is also used as the background in text fields. Panels use Foreground and Light Color over Background, and text fields use Foreground over Light Color. Which means that if Light Color is bright enough to be read against Background (panels) then Foreground over Light Color (text fields) is unreadable, whereas if Light Color is dark enough that Foreground over Light Color (text fields) becomes readable, then Light Color over Background (panels) becomes unreadable.

There's more, of course. If an item in a panel listing is de-emphasized, it goes to Dark Color which is typically unreadable against Background. You can set it to something lighter ... but Dark Color is itself used as a background, with text set in Foreground on top. So if you change Dark Color so that Dark Color-on-Background becomes readable, then Foreground-on-Dark Color becomes unreadable, and vice-versa.

The two provided dark schemes, Darkside and Midnight, both struggle to be readable. Darkside might be the best you can do, but contrast levels are still way below what, say, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) would recommend. Midnight, which is a more attractive scheme, is problematic; some of it is going to be unusable, whatever you do.

The problem, as I understand it, is that there are too few colors available, and several of them are used for both backgrounds and foregrounds in different contexts. Unless I'm missing something, this creates a Catch-22 situation where there is no right answer, at least as far as dark schemes are concerned. Everything you can do falls far short of the levels of contrast needed to make Studio comfortable to work with. (You can probably make things slightly better by choosing colors from different parts of the spectrum, as opposed to selecting from a more monotone palette, but that creates a garish mess and doesn't really resolve the issue).

I'm not optimistic that this will get fixed, but it really needs to be, because it makes Studio an ergonomic nightmare.

Valiska

Indeed. I was trying to fix precisely the same problem two days ago, and failed for the same reason.

Richard Haseltine

There is no provided style named Midnight, that must be from another source.

DustRider

Unfortunately I have the same problem. I use a laptop so the low contrast text with the smaller screen size (17in) makes using DAZ very difficult. Unfortunately it only gets worse with increasing age. DS is definitely the worst GUI for visibility that I work with. I've never been able to find an acceptable combination to where I can easily read everything. I often simply have to just click on textual options/items to get them to highlight in yellow with black text so I can see what it is, or hover over the icons to get the popup to show which is usually easier to read.