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Which colour scheme is better?

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Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#71

Post by gridlockd »

zwaps wrote: post #58

I think it's just an individual thing, and we should all respect that. There is a litany of posts and opinions of people who say their eyes hurt with a light color scheme, or it produces spots in their vision, or it hurts their concentration etc. I have no reason not to believe them. Many people prefer to even show their code in a dark scheme on websites. Furthermore, many people don't care but think dark is cooler.…

> I have no reason not to believe them.

It's not that these people are lying, but it is common that people's subjective experience is biased by their expectation.

If I expect that dark themes are easier on the eye, I'm likely to experience any eye strain that might be caused by a bright theme in an exaggerated fashion.

Similarly, if I were to buy into this "the Pulfrich effect will slow you down" hypothesis, I might subjectively experience a benefit from switching to a light theme.

I don't buy into the hypothesis, so I'm sticking with a dark theme (as well as f.lux cranked up to eleven).

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#72

Post by chestervonwinch »

I dunno. For me, a variety is more important than strictly using light or dark. I tend to switch things up every so often similar to how I might rearrange furniture or bring a new meal into weeknight rotation. Sometimes I just need a change of scenery (in a loose sense of the word).

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#73

Post by darkhorse13 »

zwaps wrote: post #58

I think it's just an individual thing, and we should all respect that. There is a litany of posts and opinions of people who say their eyes hurt with a light color scheme, or it produces spots in their vision, or it hurts their concentration etc. I have no reason not to believe them. Many people prefer to even show their code in a dark scheme on websites. Furthermore, many people don't care but think dark is cooler.…

This is absolutely the right approach. Who cares which is "scientifically" better? The truth is, probably around half the population prefers dark mode, the other half prefers light mode. Apps, tools, dashboards and the like should give users the choice to toggle between the two. That's it. All this evangelicalism for one mode or the other is pointless.

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#74

Post by crazygringo »

chrismorgan wrote: post #44
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's true that the minimum brightness is still too bright, that's an easy fix. If you're on a Mac, there are several freeware utilities to do exactly that, Shady was at one point the most popular. I assume there are similar utilities for Windows and Linux. They work by lowering the RGB intensities of all the pixels on your screen, instead of lowering the backlight further. It has exactly the same effect in the end…

It doesn’t have exactly the same effect: you get lower contrast . When you reduce the brightness of the backlight, blacks and whites alike become less bright. When you reduce the RGB intensities, the whites become less bright but the blacks stay just as bright. How big a deal this is depends on the technique. On OLED panels there’s approximately no difference, but it’s a huge deal in low-light scenarios with most LCD…

I just tried it on my MacBook Pro in a perfectly dark bathroom to double-check.

Yes... at minimum brightness #000 isn't pure black, it's a very, very, very dark gray.

But nevertheless -- there's still plenty of contrast. So while it's technically true you get slightly lower contrast... I don't see how, in practice, this would be a problem for anyone who's simply doing reading/writing/coding.

(Remember, many coding themes are intentionally lower-contrast anyways -- black text on white is really dark gray, bright text on dark background is a dark gray background. So it's doubly not a problem.)

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#75

Post by chownie »

This is a pretty sloppy just-so-story for the author's preferences.

Mentions the Pulfrich effect, but this is for lateral movements with stationary vision. Author then leaps into a discussion about how this happens every time you "rescan" without giving a single line of evidence that this happens.

This is especially dubious given Saccadic Masking[0] meaning there's no perceived visual input while the eyes are in motion. How exactly are we being slowed by the Pulfrich Effect during reading if motion ("lateral motion" required to satisfy the conditions of the effect) is blocked by the brain?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#76

Post by Fnoord »

Kuinox wrote: post #61
suprfnk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the author is probably not speaking to you personally. It's a valid test for people that only use dark themes though. Why the snarky response?

Dark themes were not common until recently, almost everyone tried light theme.

The context matters. Dark themes, where? I guess OS? Or WWW? In terminal and CLI, it was and is the default. The difference has been the color of the text (green, white, grey, yellow). This was during the time of CRT monitors though.

The commercial web popularized white background. Companies like eBay, for example. Although my favourite website back in those days (Webwereld) had some kind of pastel light yellow, IIRC. Marktplaats (popular alternative to eBay, old) also still has this. I suppose the colour is mostly akin to old newspapers, and backlight.

HN also has this colour, by default. Goes very well with the orange (tho I'm biased as that is my fav colour). Though I use a CSS sheet to turn HN into Solarized Dark (which according to the article is voluntarily hurting myself). I'm actually fine with the HN theme, during day. I'd be OK with Solarized Light during day, and Solarized Dark during night. Same with Android and macOS. What worries me is that it ain't going to work fluently for all the programs and settings.

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#77

Post by Firadeoclus »

_Microft wrote: post #60

A hack for viewing the video showing the Pulfrich effect: Grab a pair of 3D glasses and point the side with the linear polarizer towards your LCD screen (it is the one that will not let the screen show through if rotated correctly). You can now adjust the brightness of this image by changing the relative angle between glasses and screen to change the intensity of the 3D effect.

I tried this with RealD 3D glasses, for some reason you have to look through them back-to-front for this to work (and it works on both sides equally).

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#78

Post by Firadeoclus »

formerly_proven wrote: post #13
thelazydogsback wrote: post #9

I think the point that's missing is reflective vs. transmitive surfaces -- that brain is used to processing not the latter, but the former -- where reflected light is related to, and less than, ambient light. If we were using hi-res color e-ink displays, I think he'd be right about eye-strain. However, using a light scheme with mostly text, you have a huge rectangle of LED (most of the time) white light blaring at yo…

> However, using a light scheme with mostly text, you have a huge rectangle of LED (most of the time) white light blaring at you, which itself causes eyestrain. I'll basically repeat my comment from below, but ergonomically set up displays meet ambient brightness, but don't exceed it (much). If you're sitting in front of a display set to 80 % brightness (~300+ cd/m²) in the evening, you're simply holding it wrong and…

> I'll basically repeat my comment from below, but ergonomically set up displays meet ambient brightness, but don't exceed it (much).

This is true in a world where many UI backgrounds are close to "white", i.e. maximum brightness. That in itself is an unfortunate situation (though driven in part by the technical limitations of display technology until now) because there are plenty of cases where you actually do want the ability to display above ambient brightness, just not for what is meant to be a neutral background. HDR displays are designed for high peak brightness and shine with photorealistic content - pun intended.

Content such as games, video, photos all have in common that their colour/brightness histograms are much less skewed towards the extremes than typical UIs which are dominated by large uniform, mostly bright areas. Those should be limited to ambient brightness, and ideally on a true brightness plane, not clipped to the faces of an RGB cube.

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#79

Post by _Microft »

Firadeoclus wrote: post #77
_Microft wrote: post #60

A hack for viewing the video showing the Pulfrich effect: Grab a pair of 3D glasses and point the side with the linear polarizer towards your LCD screen (it is the one that will not let the screen show through if rotated correctly). You can now adjust the brightness of this image by changing the relative angle between glasses and screen to change the intensity of the 3D effect.

I tried this with RealD 3D glasses, for some reason you have to look through them back-to-front for this to work (and it works on both sides equally).

Yes, that's expected and since the only thing that mattered for the purpose of viewing the video in the article was orienting the linear polarizer towards the computer screen, I omitted the details.

Here is the explanation. 3D projectors normally use circularly polarized light because this method is insensitive to head movements and tilts which would lead to unpleasant effects if they were using linearly polarized light instead.

The different images for both eyes are projected with clockwise and counter-clockwise circularly polarized light. The glasses first convert the circularly polarized light coming from the cinema screen (these are special screens that don't mangle the polarization) to linearly polarized light which is then going through a linear polarizer, eliminating the unwanted polarization. The filter for the other eye eliminates the other polarization which allows to target the left and right eye individually.

Because the glasses are built like this, the linear polarizer has to be towards the eye and therefore we need to turn it around for us to work here. It doesn't matter for the eye that the remaining light goes through the quarterwave plate by the way.

(I'm not sure why this technique works with different colors at once btw!).

If you want to read more about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizer#Absorbing_and_passin...

Re: Which colour scheme is better?

#80

Post by chrismorgan »

gridlockd wrote: post #70
chrismorgan wrote: post #47

Related: high- versus low-contrast. Most colour schemes are low-contrast, and I haven’t the foggiest idea why, because I’ve always hated that, and find it makes no sense whatsoever (zero) as a decision. I used to use molokai (dark, fairly high contrast); a few years ago I decided to build a new minimal, light, high contrast one from scratch, which I called “bland”, inspired by the printed code of yesteryear. Paired w…

Some people complain about afterimage on high contrast dark themes. I'm definitely in your camp though.

Yeah, high-contrast is much riskier on dark themes—it all depends on whether you’re going for æsthetic dark, accessibility dark or low-light dark, which are three different situations with quite different needs. But for light themes at least, high contrast has no serious risks.
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