Change the color scheme on your Windows 10 PC without affecting any other colors.
Change the color scheme on your Windows 10 PC without affecting any other colors.
I’m seeking a simple method to flip black and white in your PC’s color scheme. Because you’re sensitive to bright light, reducing screen brightness is important. The built-in high contrast options aren’t ideal—they affect other colors too, making navigation confusing. If you could just toggle the default palette between black and white, that would likely be a better fix. Anyone have suggestions or tools for this? Updated September 6, 2022 by An0maly_76
Uncertain about reversing black and white, but a custom Windows theme might help. Some themes, like SecureUXTheme, work well across many apps (though font colors can sometimes shift). Dark mode options are widely available—try vsthemes or DeviantArt for alternatives. To install, use SecureUXTheme, hook the logon UI, reboot, extract your chosen theme, and copy files to the correct folder. After applying via Themetool, you can patch it in again. You can also skip accent changes by ignoring certain options. This usually doesn’t alter websites; a reader extension can help with that.
I was trying Night Eye with color swapping in Firefox's palette, but it still caused a brief white screen when loading pages. This affected my experience differently depending on the task—browsing didn't work as expected while other activities did. If this would fix just black and white swapping without impacting other settings, it should be effective.
It could assist if I reduced the backlight brightness and included a subtle lighting behind the screen. This would prevent the monitor from appearing as a stark square against a dark background, easing eye fatigue.
I've experimented with a medium gray background, but it still bothers me. I'm confused about why nobody considered an option to invert black and white for this. It seems like a simple feature could help many people.
I realized Google might be the main issue. These developers seem to have programmed their icons—like Send, Attach File, Discard/Delete—to always appear in black, making them hard to see on dark backgrounds. The only workaround I found is using a light gray background with white text and yellow or green for links. I adjusted the high-contrast options to make it more usable, though some small annoyances remain, such as white boxes at the ends of saved account pages on the sign-in screen. I’m okay with that level of imperfection, but I’m curious if other fixes here could help. At least now I can clearly see what I’m doing without straining my eyes or brain. I even tried hiding the text in Windows accessibility settings to focus only on the mouse cursor, giving it a sort of flashlight effect. Edited September 7, 2022 by An0maly_76 – updated with more details
I found a way to get the desired effect. The universal dark mode in Win 10 isn’t a single setting, so it didn’t work initially. You can adjust colors through Personalization, but you’ll need to configure several options for the best result. A screenshot was taken showing the steps I followed. Another option lets you choose dark mode for Windows-only apps, apps-only, or both, though I couldn’t locate a screenshot for that. Updated September 14, 2022 by An0maly_76 – more info provided.