Digital Imaging and Photography → [Tech] Lightroom appearance in Windows 7

Installed Windows 7 64 recently, and LR 3 works great running on it.

One small thing maybe other LR users have experienced - in XP, the entire LR program was black and/or gray. When running maximized this made it easier to see the photos with no lighter or brighter colors as part of the window scheme.

In Win 7, no matter what theme I choose or how much I alter it, the title and file bar in LR is a corresponding color, not the uniform black it always was in XP. There is no setting in the program itself that alters this.

Small thing, but it bugs me.

The only way to fix it is to run one of those high contrast Win themes that uses a lot of black, but those kill my eyes.

I don't have LR, so I can't test myself, but try this:

Right-click on the LR shortcut, choose Properties, then go to the "Compatibility" tab.
In there, experiment with the settings, including setting compatibility mode to XP SP3. You may find the magic combination that either restores the old XP display, or at least find something acceptable specific to this one program.

Brad.

The only thing I get are several Vista entries (with SP1, SP2, and so on). From what I've read, Vista also ignored this type of appearance issue with individual programs. I messed with the Win 7 themes and appearance settings, and can make the entire OS look intensely ugly and sorta get the black LR back, but like I said, it's pretty ugly.

LR is a 64 bit program when it installs to Windows 7, so that may explain why no XP compatibility mode is visible.

Great suggestion, thanks. New to 7, so I didn't know about the compatibility mode - it may come in handy with some of the older programs I'll be installing.

Have you tried turning Aero off? That gets rid of the Transparency in the title bar...

I don't have a problem with the way LR looks - I'm super happy with Win7...

I did turn off Aero - permanently.

I played with the themes and the individual display settings and couldn't get Lightroom to look right for the title bar and the file menu bar (file, View, etc.). Lightroom for those two elements takes on whatever the system preference is.

Not a huge deal, but surprising.

Otherwise, LR is much snappier with the extra RAM it can make use of. I dig that.

I do not have the problem you have.

I also left Aero on since it's actually quite nice.

I'm doing a hardware upgrade in a few days which will involve re-installing Windows 7. Once the drivers and Win updates are done, I'll install Lightroom next and see what happens.

I might keep Aero on this time.