GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 616450
Use a nicer background colour
Last modified: 2010-08-08 15:25:28 UTC
The background colour used for EoG's viewing area doesn't provide a very good backdrop for images. It would be good to have a colour which made viewing images easier and made it easier to focus on the image being viewed (apologies, I don't know the correct terminology or have technical explanations). The current background colour seems to be derived from the theme (Clearlooks: #EDECEB, Ambience: #F0EBE2, Shiki-Brave: #D8D8D8), but it always seems to end up being a shade of grey. Black is a good background colour. I've also seen white used.
Just as you don't want any light pollution when look at the stars, you don't want the colours of the chrome interfere with picture. Black is good because it "resets" your view. Whatever shade the background colour is, the RGB values need to be balanced. Otherwise your eyes will get a 'bias' towards the background colour and the picture will look different.
Well, there is bug 502992 requesting a possibility to generally switch the background color. So, maybe we can make this two-part. Implement a color chooser like for transparent images and then (after checking if it works out) set black (or what fits better) as the default.
(In reply to comment #2) > Well, there is bug 502992 requesting a possibility to generally switch the > background color. > > So, maybe we can make this two-part. Implement a color chooser like for > transparent images and then (after checking if it works out) set black (or what > fits better) as the default. Sounds good.
Bastien Nocera has created a "gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme" GtkSetting that could be used to solve this issue. See here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617955
(In reply to comment #4) > Bastien Nocera has created a "gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme" GtkSetting > that could be used to solve this issue. See here: > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617955 Okay, we do this now (bug 624262) and I'm starting to wonder if we still really need to force a black background as default.
Switched in gnome-2-32 and master: commit 399d49129aa794d588968f2d4f26477a6069524b Author: Felix Riemann <> Date: Sun Aug 8 17:19:57 2010 +0200 Make image area background black by default Said to improve focussing on the image and avoiding interference from the UI. Fixes bug 616450. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.