[Maverickz]

In Kodi 17.x "buttons" were much lighter in color, but in Kodi 18 they are darker. By "button" I mean like the Genre, Title, Year, Actors, etc.
This is a problem because I like to set my background to pure black and this makes the buttons much harder to see. How can I change the button color back to how they were in Kodi 17.x?

This is using the default UI Estuary.

[pkscout]

I don't know about changing them back to the exact color they were in 17, but you can change the color of the Estuary theme.  To do that:

1- go to Settings > Interface
2- Click (or select via remote) on the COLORS option
3- From that list pick another color

Maybe one of the other colors will be better for you.  If none of them are, you can create another color.  If you go to the skin.estuary folder (whose location is going to vary based on platform) and look for the colors folder you'll see a bunch of XML files.  Copy the default one and name it something new.  The colors in there are all hex values, so you can change those values as needed to get the desired result.  Note that if you change the built in Estuary theme anytime there is a Kodi update you're changes will be overwritten, so you should keep a copy of that color file somewhere.

[Maverickz]

I don't know about changing them back to the exact color they were in 17, but you can change the color of the Estuary theme.  To do that:

1- go to Settings > Interface
2- Click (or select via remote) on the COLORS option
3- From that list pick another color

Maybe one of the other colors will be better for you.  If none of them are, you can create another color.  If you go to the skin.estuary folder (whose location is going to vary based on platform) and look for the colors folder you'll see a bunch of XML files.  Copy the default one and name it something new.  The colors in there are all hex values, so you can change those values as needed to get the desired result.  Note that if you change the built in Estuary theme anytime there is a Kodi update you're changes will be overwritten, so you should keep a copy of that color file somewhere.

 Thanks. I actually tried that but it only changes the highlighted/focused color, not the un-highlighted/non-focused color. I need to change the non-focused color which is black, once I focus on a button it's blue and easy to see at that point.