Lower contrast in modern theme

[Fireye04]

Tested versions

v4.6.dev.custom_build [250ef8d]

System information

Godot v4.6.dev (250ef8d) - cpe:/o:nixos:nixos:25.11 #1-NixOS SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 23 14:24:41 UTC 2025 on Wayland - X11 display driver, Single-window, 1 monitor - Vulkan (Forward+) - integrated Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics (TGL GT2) - 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz (8 threads) - 15.35 GiB memory

Issue description

This might just be a user preference thing, but I found it much harder to parse the engine foreground from the background in the modern theme (#111118) when compared to the classic theme, which pretty significantly hurts the readability of the engine. My only machine right now is a laptop with low screen brightness, and I pretty frequently use it outside, which results in a good amount of glare. This probably only serves to make this problem worse, though I'd argue a default theme should serve to be as broadly accessible & readable as possible.

Otherwise, very much enjoying the new theme and will likely end up customizing the color palette on my own to remedy this, which is certainly always an option if this problem isn't determined to be pertinent to the engine defaults.

Steps to reproduce

Compile godot with the new theme, launch godot.

Minimal reproduction project (MRP)

Any godot build will do

[passivestar]

This needs specifics to be actionable, as in which UI elements need the contrast increase. If you compare the new theme with the old one you'll see that some elements have less contrast while some other elements have more contrast. Some things that currently lack contrast are known bugs that will be fixed in follow-up PRs, i.e I just opened a PR to fix one of them, but there are few other left to go. Make sure to test the master branch because the contrast has already been increased since the PR was initially opened, so a lot of screenshots from the theme PR are now outdated.

[Fireye04]

This is from a master branch build I did this morning from 250ef8d

This is specifically about discerning foreground from background, as the two primary colors have been made significantly more similar, and I'm having trouble discerning where certain UI elements begin and end:

The new button style is great for this though:

[Giganzo]

Are we aiming to meet any type of standard, like https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/non-text-contrast.html?

[passivestar]

@Fireye04 Thanks for the clarification. It's possible that the main UI surface color could be brighter, will need some tests

Are we aiming to meet any type of standard, like https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/non-text-contrast.html?

We could. There are a couple of things to keep in mind though:

1. Solutions to a lot of godot's contrast problems (in both themes, because there are some elements that are hard to discern in the classic one too) may need more code than one may expect because a lot of elements in the engine are sharing colors while being drawn on different backgrounds, which means more type variations or hardcoded values will need to be added if you want to be strict with contrast ratios. I'm all for it, but all of the problems probably won't be solved in a day

2. We'll need to evaluate to what extent a web standard like that is applicable to a desktop application like a game engine. It may or may not be worth following very strictly depending on their differences and on what a user expects from a desktop app UI. It makes sense to always use judgement and evaluate what fits a particular situation, but overall I love standards

[timothyqiu]

I just encountered a similar issue.

I was checking the effect of PROPERTY_HINT_ENUM_SUGGESTION in the inspector, and I'm wondering why we didn't have a separator between the special value and the fixed enum values.

It turns out that it's just an illusion created by the overall darkness and low contrast.

Modern	Classic

Similar colored menu in Blender, for reference:

[passivestar]

@timothyqiu PR: #112313

[passivestar]

Changing base color from #252525 to #272727 and editor contrast from 0.3 to 0.35 brings the new theme in line with the old one terms of contrast:

Current	New Values	Classic

We could set those as new defaults for the new theme