Edit June 2nd, 2011: Turns out that the extreme darkness is due to an Intel graphics output bug under Linux, causing it to output the desktop as 0-255 instead of 16-235, leading to crushed blacks and overly bright whites, which together with an already dark skin makes the graphics incredibly dark; if this affects you, see the discussion on page 163 for details (in particular this post).
Choque Wrote:Calibrate your TV and everything is fine. Of course if your TV is not calibrated and the black level is way off you could have problems. I don't have any problem seeing the up/down selectors or checkboxes or whatsoever.
Why even talk about something you don't understand?
Anyway, the NTSC Broadcast standard specifies that Blacks may be no darker than 7.5 ire and Whites may be no lighter than 100 ire (
http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html#Setup). Most TV sets/projectors intentionally crush blacks both to increase contrast (to make colors "pop"), and to ensure that NTSC blacks look black instead of gray.
The problem comes in when you had a ill-informedly designed skin like the "Aeon Black" theme, where the blacks are illegal (no, that's not a racist joke, hehe), far under what's legal for TV material, which in turn causes everything to be crushed into one black mess.
The solution is to brighten every black graphics resource by 10-20 percent, as I said above.
If this skin had been submitted to a broadcast TV station as artwork to be displayed on the air, it would have been rejected on technical grounds. No matter how beautiful it is, its blacks are illegal and will appear crushed on most television sets.
This is one of the most basic laws of designing content for television.
Here's how to compress your photoshop document luma and chroma range to be within spec:
http://www.movingpicture.com/news/2005/0...in_ad.html
There's also a filter under Filter > Video > NTSC Safe to simulate display on an NTSC television, but it's not a great guide since televisions are usually much darker than that.