Premiere Pro CC: can blue text interface be changed back to yellow?

[ninose11]

Just wondering if there's an option in preferences to change the color of the interface text. It used to be yellow and now it's more difficult to see.

I notice the blue text across the entire range of updated programs: AE, PP, Photoshop, etc.

So is it a setting in the cloud itself that would allow me to change the color back to yellow?

If not, not big issue, I'll just have to get used to it. Love the new interface in any case. Much more responsive with no issues.

Thank you, Adobe!

[coastalmedia]

Hopefully this can result in a mass flood of bug reports!

[coastalmedia]

Make sure to submit a bug report and feature request for double the fun!

[coastalmedia]

Not a change for the better.

[coastalmedia]

It may look modern and fresh, but 8 hours a day on it and it's not as good as it was.

I don't give a single **** about how my software interface looks, I just want to be able to use it efficiently and for long periods of time without causing undue wear to my already questionable eyesight...

Was nothing wrong with the yellow.

[shooternz]

To be fair.

This is 100% not true.

Look, you guys, ******** about this in the forums isn't really going to solve anything; it's not like Adobe even bothers listening to customer feedback..

[tombo]

I have put in a bug report. I hope everyone else does.

BTW I have also reported another bug re Layer selection and Bounding Boxes.

see below

Re: AE CC 2014.1 - layer selection and bounding box issue.

[Derjis]

shooternz wrote:

To be fair.

This is 100% not true.

Look, you guys, ******** about this in the forums isn't really going to solve anything; it's not like Adobe even bothers listening to customer feedback..

No no, you're right of course. My bad.

[Steven L. Gotz]

If it was up to me, I would like to be able to have a menu item that allowed me to make everything but the Program and Source monitors a simple monochrome. I don't need the colors of the interface interacting in any way with the video. But that is just me.

I don't know how hard it would be to make the interface colors an individual choice, but I think that perhaps that might be something worth asking for.

[Steven L. Gotz]

it's not like Adobe even bothers listening to customer feedback..

No, it just appears that they listen to the wrong people.

[jonny9091]

What really irks me about this is not just the poor visual aspect. It's the fact that long-standing common sense issues remain unresolved.

Where is the color picker when creating a color matte??? This is the most basic functionality I can think of....and yet it was superseded by trying to make the program look "clean and modern".

[Jerryno]

Wtf Adobe, blue text on dark background? Who did this? Does he know a bit about colors? Human eyes are least sensitive to blue, and blue on dark background has also a bad contrast. Also the focusing distance to a blue color is different than to red(yellow). This all makes it hard to read. When something works don't change it, now, fix it pls back or make it user adjustable.

[jstrawn]

shooternz wrote:

To be fair.

This is 100% not true.

Look, you guys, ******** about this in the forums isn't really going to solve anything; it's not like Adobe even bothers listening to customer feedback..

Thanks. Shooternz. We really do listen and we do our best to respond in a timely matter. But we can't please everyone and everything takes time. Please bear with us folks, adding a pref to set the color back to yellow (or to customize it as you please) is an important request for the usability and health of many of our users, but it's not necessarily one quick code line of change so it will take time.

All of you adding feature requests for it (or bug report, if that was the route you chose) are doing the right thing.

[nlphoto1234]

I agree - I'm a self-appointed Premiere evangelist, LOL.  What I tell all the people I know who are looking for a place to go from FCP 7 (I'm amazed at how many people still use exclusively that!) is that Adobe has been wonderfully responsive to the needs of people who came from FCP, listening to what they liked about it and incorporating those features into Premiere.  I appreciate it. 

[ninose11]

As the OP of this thread, I'd just like to add a positive note. Apart from the blue text issue, I'm thrilled with the latest version of PPCC. I found it noticeably more responsive and stabler than the previous version, and I do like the cleaner look. And the new features like the search bins in the project window have convinced me to stick with the latest version and not go back. But I eagerly look forward to a future firmware update that gives us (ideally) the option to choose the hot color font or at least gives us back the yellow color as a legacy alternative option. I know these things take time, and I very much appreciate jstrawn's reply. It means Adobe is listening and will hopefully provide a solution.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'd agree ... some fine new features, and improved stability of some problematic features of the previous "ish". However, the whole color thing is a ton of team/developer time spent on an "ish" that didn't exist ... when there's other things we users might have preferred they work on ...

Neil

[coastalmedia]

Hi Jstrawn,

I personally would even be happy with an interim "preference' kind of code adjustment. For what it's worth, it's the only gripe i've come across with the update. I love the enlarged Anchor Point indicators, i've spent much time trying to find those little buggers they seemed to be good at hiding!

I played around for a few hours yesterday attempting to make the suggested preference modifications above work. I did get it to a point where AE would open without any errors, but unfortunately the colour would not change. There is obviously more to it than the "Hot Key Color" hex codeline.

It is however disappointing as i'm sure you can sympathise, after waiting so long for the AE audio scrubbing memory leak to be rectified in the new version, only to be hit in the face with something else that dramatically reduces my productivity.

CS4/CS6 seemed so much more stable to me than CC2014.
I just don't understand where software is going.

Apple's doing the same thing with their Mavericks, it's just a giant monochrome bug! Since when is stability and ease of use NOT the main aim?

How does one go about becoming a Beta tester for new releases and what is their requirement? I think using AE for extended periods of time should be a requirement for testing if it is not already. As I, and i'm sure most all of the others who are writing to you here, are professionals using your software (in my case almost exclusively) all day, daily.
There is no issue with the blue if you're only looking at it for an hour, it's long term use that fatigues and let's not forget a lot of us have been staring at screens for years so our eyes are already vulnerable!

Kind regards for your honest and humble reply to this post, certainly refreshing after reading the initial nonchalance of an earlier reply from Adobe here.

Many thanks,

Matt

[jstrawn]

coastalmedia wrote:

Hi Jstrawn,

I personally would even be happy with an interim "preference' kind of code adjustment. For what it's worth, it's the only gripe i've come across with the update. I love the enlarged Anchor Point indicators, i've spent much time trying to find those little buggers they seemed to be good at hiding!

I played around for a few hours yesterday attempting to make the suggested preference modifications above work. I did get it to a point where AE would open without any errors, but unfortunately the colour would not change. There is obviously more to it than the "Hot Key Color" hex codeline.

It is however disappointing as i'm sure you can sympathise, after waiting so long for the AE audio scrubbing memory leak to be rectified in the new version, only to be hit in the face with something else that dramatically reduces my productivity.

CS4/CS6 seemed so much more stable to me than CC2014.
I just don't understand where software is going.

Apple's doing the same thing with their Mavericks, it's just a giant monochrome bug! Since when is stability and ease of use NOT the main aim?

How does one go about becoming a Beta tester for new releases and what is their requirement? I think using AE for extended periods of time should be a requirement for testing if it is not already. As I, and i'm sure most all of the others who are writing to you here, are professionals using your software (in my case almost exclusively) all day, daily.
There is no issue with the blue if you're only looking at it for an hour, it's long term use that fatigues and let's not forget a lot of us have been staring at screens for years so our eyes are already vulnerable!

Kind regards for your honest and humble reply to this post, certainly refreshing after reading the initial nonchalance of an earlier reply from Adobe here.

Many thanks,

Matt

Thanks and you're welcome. We agree on a lot of points. I wouldn't like it if things got changed on me as a user just to make it 'modern'. But that actually wasn't the case here. One thing I've learned over the years is that they do have valid reasons behind such changes. They're just not reasons that please all of our user at once, which is of course impossible. I myself don't always agree with certain changes, but I have to admit that in some case I've come to like things I really didn't like at first. The idea of a pref is good and we may see something like that before long (just a guess, no inside info there). But keep in mind that the UI was fully re-designed with the blue and everything else, so it's not as easy as changing a line of code from , say, color="000001" to color="000002". One thing I can assure you of though, and it's what we've already discussed internally many times, is that it's important for our users to be heard, even if the particular change they want does necessarily come how and when they want it.

As for our pre-release testing program, we generally invite users out of the community through our sales and marketing channels (sometimes including forums, etc.). There is also a public request form here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=prerelease_interest

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm still waiting for a valid reason for the change to blue, other than a) to blend with changes being done to the other apps or b) because it looked more modern/fresh/cool/pretty. That's it so far. So I'd be delighted to get a further explanation of the reasons for the change.

And it's not like this is just something to get used to ... I've yet to see an answer from staff really accepting that this is a physiological issue for many of their users, NOT a preference or simple comfort issue. I'm in contact with a couple professional graders, put in a typical 8-10 hour day at a console. Who like working in Speedgrade, and over the last year had become total SpeedGrade users ... but ... they're getting headaches and working slower from the same issues as many PrPro users are having.

They do this for a living. You give them a choice between slower working and constant headaches and switching back to the "R" product ... well, not wise for Adobe, is it? Currently they're waiting for some confirmation that an option to fix this is coming. Not hopeful. So ... one is already getting his hand back in shall we say, other options. Not because they want to, mind you. But because they simply cannot see using these products anymore. Literally too painful.

I don't put in that much time on video a week, a couple hours a day. And as much of that I've done in SpeedGrade as possible. PrPro I work in. SpeedGrade has been a thrill. But even Sg is now drudge work. Finding the sliders: dark-gray against slightly-darker-gray background ... what design mogul would EVER suggest that? In any of the digital video products now, trying to scan to catch settings on say the export page? No sirree Bob, can't do a quick scan of settings any more. You have to stop and look hard at them.

The sad thing is this "ish" has some things I'm quite pleased to get ... but ... I'm looking at reverting. I can as I don't have to integrate with anyone else. One of the more video-driven shops doesn't have that sort of option much of the time.

Neil

[aikane]

David Kuspa wrote:

We actually did use a brighter blue color during our beta cycle, but some of our beta testers felt it was too bright and harsh, so we dialed it back.

Have you tried adjusting your Appearance preference Brightness slider to a lighter gray background? This also brightens up the blue a bit.

David Kuspa | Adobe | Sr. Experience Designer, Digital Video & Audio

The reason I came to this forum was that I tried a brighter interface and it doesn't help. I selected a value near the middle of the slider but I still found it quite difficult to read the blue text. Although the blue does brighten a bit, the contrast between the text and the background is not nearly acceptable. As nlphoto1234 demonstrates, you've reduced the contrast between text and background significantly. I don't know what your designers were thinking, but contrast is by far the most important factor in legibility. That's really basic stuff. You've made PP a lot harder to use for a lot of people.

[Stephen Barrante]

Also throwing my 2 cents in, as the gold for parameters values. Gold and gray balance very nicely, and the blue kind of vibrates against the grey on my screens.

I appreciate that Adobe is trying to make each program more uniform. I'm sure many hours were spent noodling with the "perfect color" – for something like this, that could work better or worse across all different kinds of screen setups, etc, it would probably be prudent to add a global adjustment to change the color in the prefs.

[jstrawn]

R. Neil Haugen wrote:

I've yet to see an answer from staff really accepting that this is a physiological issue for many of their users, NOT a preference or simple comfort issue.

I've mentioned in a very similar thread about the 'blueness' that we recognize that it's more significant than just a matter of color preference in this case. I can dig that up if needed, but I'm saying it again now.

[RyanWaxberg]

Just want to another vote for getting it back how it was. The bigger issue than the blue, is that you darkened the rest especially in Premiere in order to use the blue color. As a result I pretty much only see glare, in my office. Its like I'm outside. Look at how visible my mic is for example

For comparison, the grey in Photoshop, same monitor, same everything --- much clearer:

The Premiere interface is so dark it just makes it look like a mirror. It's really awful on my eyes. Only way I can currently do any work in Premiere or AE is by turning off the lights in my office. Feature Request submitted

[TimmyCrackCorn]

While I agree the interface background itself should be user-choice as well, your setup is really bad I'm afraid.  There is waaay too much reflection (for me) in either of them. 

I have close to ZERO glare/reflection with my setup.  I don't have glass-covered monitors for one, and your ambient light is waaay too high for full-time editing.  I took all my ceiling lights and inverted them.  Now there is just a nice glow on the ceiling that "trickles" down the walls.

You should definitely consider making some changes to avoid headaches, eye-strain, etc.  I've been there, and it's awful ... kind of like the new blue highlighting.

[RyanWaxberg]

I tend to turn my lights off if I'm doing heavy AE work, most of the time I'm in PS, InDesign, or Sublime. It's a corporate office, I don't have the luxury of doing whatever I want to the lighting. Its never been a problem before this new dark interface.

[Peferling]

Adobe does allow for Rollback via the CC Manager if the issues are mission critical:

Install a previous version of any Creative Cloud application

I've been using Adobe since they struck dirt, encountered my fair share of buggy updates that forced a reinstall, (which meant spending days spinning install disks to go back), and have to admit that the CC manager has done much to alleviate that process.  My last roll back was a few clicks and going to lunch.  Nice.

I'll continue to crank out work and keep an eye for the next patch and give it go when I'm ready, (never update software while in the middle of project).  They will fix it, and life will go on.