Windows 10: How to customize UI colors?

I am trying to customize colors of windows and native elements.
Mainly I want to set the color of UI elements to something different than 100% white,
say for example 90% white. Pure white hurts my eyes and in the end of the
day I have issues with eyes. I need a way to setup several color schemes for
different lighting.

After some search I've found out that one option is to use the so-called "High contrast theme".
Is it the proper way to customize UI colors? It sounds weird because I just want to adjust the UI colors
to reduce eye strain, not much to do with high contrast.
I tried it and it worked for some settings: I can set up some colors now.
I really like that I can set the global color for elements, such as window background, button face.
But there appear many issues with UI.

Issues that are most annoying with High contrast on:

1.

Colors of many elements borders and separators are same as text color, in my case - all
black (because I use black for text), and therefore most native UI looks awful.
I cannot find anything that can adjust border colors separately.
This is very frustrating. I've spent 2 days and found nothing that helps with that.

For example this is a GUI of one notepad++ dialog:

Further, all buttons and the scroll bar are converted to same 1 px black frames.
This looks bad and it is hard to believe such setup could be made intentionally.


2.

Color of the taskbar is set to window bg color and there is no way to
set its color separately. It looks bad with light bg. Also some elements in
the taskbar appear with 1 px border and I cannot get rid of this.







Questions:


- Where are options to customize important colors such as borders, separators, taskbar?
- Why is it called "High contrast theme" and not just "custom theme"?
- If I should not use High contrast theme - then how to customize colors?

:)

 

Custom Start Menu Color

Is there a way to select a custom color for the start menu, task bar, and the like.

The colors listed all suck.

 

Start Menu background color customize

Hi,

You can change the background color of the the Start menu on Settings. To do this, follow the steps below:

• Click the Windows logo (Start button).
• Click the gear icon (Settings).
• Choose Personalization.
• Select Colors.
• Under Show color on Start, taskbar, and action center, switch the slider to
  On.
• After switching the slider to On, you can now pick what color you want or you can click the
  Automatically pick an accent color from my background checkbox to make Windows pick the color that complements the color of your desktop background.

Kindly share with us the result after you perform the steps above.

 

Custom Color Lost in Update

Hi Regina,

One of the hidden features of your updated Windows 10 is to set a custom color. If you want to access the custom accent color, follow the instructions below:

• Press Win + R to open the run command window.
• Type control color and hit OK.
• Reveal the extended menu by clicking on Show color mixer.
• Using different sliders, you can choose the color, hue, brightness , and
  intensity.
  
• Save Changes once you're done.

Let us know if you need further assistance.