Indesign Cs6 Dark Mode

[Lyric Maro]

Iknow its not a huge issue but as a designer its a little irritating. When running under the darkest theme in Illustrator and Indesign the open, save, export, and place dialogues are all in light themes even with the OS in Dark mode. All of the dialouges in Photoshop however show up dark.

I know this is an old thread but the answer from @Ashutosh_Mishra - Adobe Employee just said a lot about how Adobe are blind to anything any end user has to say, they don't even read a post correctly, time and time again!

It seems that the focus in Adobe software development is not on usability that such a basic things can not be fixed for so long time. Stop developing all those new marketing features and concentrate on making everything you have crammed into your programs work, so that they become usable for real work again.

Unless you or your client are actually shelling out the money to print spot inks, the best way to reproduce those glorious Pantone swatches as accurately as possible is to replace every spot color swatch in your document with its appropriate, Pantone-recommended CMYK swatch, found in the Pantone swatch books. (There are online resources to locate these values as well, but they may not always be 100% accurate.)

If you send a document with spot colors to a process printer, the machine will check to see if it has spot color inks loaded up. When that check comes back negative, rather than just ignoring those colors in your document, it will automatically attempt to translate your spot colors into some combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink.

Put another, less technical way: sending a document with spot colors through a standard 4-color process print is a little like translating the same sentence into a new language over and over. The end result might look passable, but it will almost certainly be missing the finer nuances of the original source material.

Uncoated swatches (such as the right swatch in the image above) tend to be slightly lighter than coated (left) to offset the natural darkening effect that uncoated paper has. Notice that the CMYK values are all lower.

When choosing colors for a client, I often try to find Pantone swatches with as little discernible difference between the spot and process sample as possible, since most clients will rarely (if ever) be printing with a true Pantone spot color ink.

One tip worth noting: a CMYK value that has at least one ink at or near 100% will usually give you a richer and more consistent process color output than a swatch with process colors all at low or mid values.

RGB is the color mode of virtually every electronic display, from your phone to your computer monitor and probably your TV, and it is effectively the opposite of CMYK. In process print, the paper starts white and brightness is subtracted with colored ink until eventually you reach black; conversely, in RGB, the background of a display is black by default, and colored light is added until eventually white is created.

This depends somewhat on the client and the intended use, but in general, if you and/or your client are serious about accurate and consistent color reproduction, you should be providing your client with a suite which includes every permutation of their logo dialed up in each of these color modes (and with multiple file types for each):

I could go further into this, but for now, just know that standard CMYK black is dialed in as 0/0/0/100, and you should generally just go with that for things like black body copy. You can make your blacks darker and richer by mixing the four process colors if you so choose, but at the expense of more inks being used on every single instance of black coloring.

Properly utilizing Pantone colors is your best chance at fighting color discrepancy, yes. But this should be considered more of a loose guide to a journey with many variables than any guarantee of success.

If color is extremely important to you, your only solution may be testing and tinkering over and over and over until you finally get acceptably close to the results you desire. But hopefully, now you have the tools to avoid some of the pitfalls along that journey, to get as close as you can, and to explain to clients, when necessary, how that whole process works.

How can an image be made, for insertion into a StackExchange question or answer, so that if a user uses dark mode and the web page's background is dark, the image displays as dark with white foreground; whereas if a user uses bright mode and the web page's background is bright, the image displays as bright with black foreground?

I know that, in a PNG file, the colour corresponding to some colour index can be made transparent. How to make it so would be a separate question relating to the app used to make the PNG file. But I see an issue in ensuring that the user's web browser displays the text in a colour contrasting with the background, whether the background is dark or bright.

I don't even know if this can be done -- it concerns how browsers render StackExchange web pages and the images they contain, rather than how to create the images. If it isn't possible, then there's no point in researching how to do the other steps in this work path, hence why I ask this question first.

It is not possible to make an image whose colors vary depending on whether the background is light or dark. The PNG* standard simply describes the color of each pixel, including an alpha channel; it has no provision for "responsive" images. However, there is a workaround:

You can also use the inverse, black text with a white outline. The point is, regardless of the background, there will always be enough contrast to read the text. The trick is to make sure that the outline is thick enough so that the eye can easily discern it. It should be at least a good 4-5 pixels thick, and possibly thicker if you are going to scale the image down. If it's only 1-2 pixels thick, it will likely look jagged and ugly, and may be harder for the reader to understand. If your image editor offers a "drop shadow" effect, this can be a good way of making a nice, easy to see outline, with a reasonably attractive gradient effect instead of a sharp cutoff.

If this is still too ugly for you, you can surround the text with an opaque background instead. Just place a black (or white) rectangle on the layer below the text, and make it big enough to completely enclose the text you want to display.

* This is also true of most other image standards, but notably the SVG format can be styled with CSS, and so this trick can be done with an SVG image. However, I don't think Stack Exchange has any provision for actually displaying SVG images as such.

That would work fine for many artistic images where white or black are just backgrounds and part of the art, rather than realistic lighting in photos. In photos everything's going to look well, inverted, because white is black and black is white.

The best solution to that is to apply transparency, which both webp and png provide. Then your background is whatever the background behind the image is (probably black on the webpage in dark mode, white otherwise), but white and black features of the image itself don't get messed up.

If you wanted the image itself to participate in dark mode more fully, where it flips its text-color too with the webpage, that is narrowly possible, but, it would hard to do reliably without the site explicitly supporting it. SVG is an image format, but it's also XML and can be inserted directly into HTML. Once it is, it participates in the full CSS styling of the page, including dark mode changes. You could inherit the text color from the page and apply it to the correct shapes (the ones that represent text) in your SVG. But it would be hard.

I'm not going to build a new one out for this answer but you can get the gist of it with this logo I worked on. An artist made it in Adobe Illustrator, then I captured it as SVG and modified the code so that the dark outline responds to color changes. As it's setup now it's a nice animation, all done in SVG - no video or gifs. But the color change could just as easily occur in response to dark mode:

The UI on XD is simply Horrible, no thought given to the usability of it whatsoever. It's very hard to read, has next to no contrast and is way too bright. I just want to work without slowly blinding myself. Photoshop's UI can be scaled, not as large as I'd like to but it's better still much better and it's dark mode looks great. There are several other problemas with XD's user experience but a dark mode and the ability to scale the UI are the most important at the moment.

I got a new computer and display. Of course with the better resolution everything is tiny. Now the XD interface is completely unreadable. I keep leaning in and squinting while I work, which is not sustainable. Please Adobe make the XD interface more accessible.

Xd is a great app, but please add the option to increase the size of the U.I in the preferences, to help reduce eye strain. The text in all of the panels, along with the labels of the artboards are a bit small. The smart guide measurements are too small. An option to increase the contrast of the U.I would be helpful too, as currently it seems a bit faint. Hope to see these improvements soon!!

Yes we need to be able to increase the font size and contrast on the interface. Look at this screenshot I attached. This is how it looks on a 27 inch 1440p monitor (with mac OSX scaling enabled!) to 2048 x 1152. The font is way too small and it should be black, not a lighter grey so its really easy to read. The entire sidebar menu for components/layers/plugins is too small. The right side panel where you do most of the work needs the ability to increase the size as well. Also, screenshots won't attach to messages on this forum so I can show what I'm seeing.

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