Hi everyone,
I was wondering if any of ever have struggled giving Cubase a somewhat monochromatic colour scheme to get rid of that Toys 'r Us look?
In the studio, I am working under a low light conditions, and find the laser tan inflicted by both Windows and Cubase atrocious. Latest research shows that too much blue light radiated by computer screens is irritating to the human brain, and whilst this doesn’t affect me, allegedly increases the risk of mental illness up to 40%, as studies have shown. To me, it’s just strenuous, and my hearing is most likely not going to benefit if being exposed to environmental strain affecting other senses.
Whilst I’ve managed to skin Windows to a medium grey, cubase is much more of a challenge as some its colour settings are linked in a pretty useless way.
Especially the editor background colours of MIDI- and Sample Editors collide quite nicely with the waveform colour, and this stretches to the Project Window alike because of the selected media being darkened, instead of being indicated otherwise ( e.g. highlighted frames ). One can only set one custom background colour for both editors, whilst each respective data display requirements ( MIDI notes and audio waveforms ) are of an entirely different nature.
Pretty pointless this, as is the inverted logics for red and yellow in the mute-sole regime, but that’s almost another story. I have no objections towards doing things differently if it makes sense, but this doesn’t at all. Simply can’t get used to it, after years of Cubase.
A closer look also reveals useless graphical elements, like for instance that weird, dithered gradient on top of all parts. In my opinion, such bs is simply obstructive and of no practical use whatsoever. Audio waveform display really needs to be revised and sobered up, I guess a return to earlier cubase versions wouldn’t hurt. Look at Protools and Ableton, their waveforms are plain and pretty. S1 would be another example.
Coming to Fade- and Volume Curves, as well as Tool Indicators / Mouse cursor icons. What a mess, I mean literally. Not going to go into details here, but if you ever fiddled with the colours you’d notice that theres too few options to set them, and that the built in logical regime is deeply flawed.
Cubase does not sufficiently invert GUI element colours according to the current background. For instance, the Line Tools are always black…ugh, unusable in many instances, for example when hovering them over, uhm, ANYTHING selected.
The bottom line is: laser tan, get used to it. Please refer to the attached screenshots, I think there needs to be a discussion. There’s also a custom made Reaper GUI layout by a friend of mine. That’s what I call a professional, sober look. Opinions please, and kind regards.
PS: mind the Mac / PC Gamma difference, the attached caps might look darker depending on what system they’re being viewed on.
