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Quick Answer

Open Settings > Accessibility > Color filters, turn the toggle on, and pick a filter. For a full high-contrast palette instead, open Settings > Accessibility > Contrast themes, choose a theme, and click Apply.

How to Use Color Filters and High-Contrast Themes in Windows ​

Applies to: Windows 11, Windows 10
Article Type: How-To
Last Updated: 2026-07-29

Summary ​

Windows can change how it renders color on screen in two different ways: Color filters shift the whole palette so similar shades become distinguishable, and Contrast themes replace the palette outright with high-contrast pairs. This article shows you how to turn on each one, when to reach for which, and the places where neither reaches.

Prerequisites ​

  • Windows 10 or Windows 11.
  • No admin rights required. Both features are personal display settings tied to your user account.
  • Nothing to install — both are built into Windows.

Instructions ​

1. Turn On Color Filters ​

Switch color filters on in Settings and see the change apply across the whole screen.

  1. Press Windows + I to open Settings.
  2. Click Accessibility in the left sidebar.
  3. Under the Vision group, click Color filters.
  4. Turn the Color filters toggle to On.
  5. The whole screen shifts colour immediately — desktop, taskbar, every open window. A preview strip at the top of the page shows a colour wheel and a set of swatches so you can compare filters without switching windows.

Verification: Look at the preview swatches at the top of the Color filters page. As you change the selection below, those swatches change with it. If they do not move, the toggle is off.

2. Pick the Filter That Matches What You Need ​

Choose between the three color-vision filters, greyscale, and the inverted options.

On the same Color filters page, select one of the options below the toggle:

FilterWhat it doesReach for it when
Red-green (green weak, deuteranopia)Shifts greens toward a distinguishable rangeGreens and reds read as the same shade
Red-green (red weak, protanopia)Shifts reds toward a distinguishable rangeReds look washed out or dark
Blue-yellow (tritanopia)Separates blues from greens and yellowsBlue and green traffic-light indicators look identical
GrayscaleRemoves colour entirelyYou want to check a design's contrast without colour helping
InvertedReverses every colourBright backgrounds cause glare or eye strain
Grayscale invertedRemoves colour and reverses itLong reading sessions on a bright screen

On Windows 11 there is also an Intensity slider beneath the options. Drag it right for a stronger correction and left for a subtler one. The screen updates live, so set it while looking at a real document rather than the preview.

Tip: Grayscale is worth a moment even if your colour vision is unaffected. Anything that becomes unreadable in greyscale is relying on colour alone — which is exactly what breaks for the person you are about to send it to.

3. Enable the Windows + Ctrl + C Shortcut ​

Turn the filter on and off from the keyboard so you can compare views in a second.

  1. On the Color filters page, find the toggle labelled Keyboard shortcut for color filters (on Windows 10 the wording is Allow the shortcut key to toggle filter on or off).
  2. Turn it On.
  3. Press Windows + Ctrl + C. The filter switches off. Press it again and the filter comes back.

This is the fastest way to answer "is this chart readable without the filter?" — flip it off, look, flip it back.

Note: The shortcut toggles the filter you have already selected. It does not cycle between filters, and it does nothing until you have chosen a filter in Step 2.

4. Switch to a Contrast Theme ​

Replace the whole Windows color palette with a guaranteed high-contrast set.

A contrast theme is a different tool from a filter. A filter shifts the colours an app chose; a contrast theme overrides them, forcing a small palette of colour pairs that are guaranteed to contrast — background, text, hyperlinks, selected text, buttons, and disabled text.

  1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Contrast themes.
  2. Open the Contrast themes dropdown and pick one:
    • Aquatic — light blue text on near-black.
    • Desert — warm yellow and white text on black.
    • Dusk — pale blue and yellow on very dark blue.
    • Night sky — white and yellow on black, the highest contrast of the four.
  3. Click Apply. The screen goes blank for a second or two while Windows repaints everything, then returns in the new palette.
  4. To customise a theme, click Edit next to the dropdown, change any of the six colour swatches, and click Save as to keep it under your own name.
  5. To return to normal, set the dropdown to None and click Apply.

Press Left Alt + Left Shift + Print Screen to toggle the last-used contrast theme on and off. Windows asks for confirmation the first time.

Note: A contrast theme is not dark mode with the brightness turned up. Dark mode is a preference apps opt into and it leaves every other colour alone — brand colours, chart series, status badges. A contrast theme discards those colours and substitutes its own, which is why buttons and links look plain but are always legible. If a softer look is what you are after, see How to Enable Dark Mode on Windows, Office, and Your Browser.

5. Know Where Filters and Themes Do Not Reach ​

Understand the content that keeps its original colors regardless of your settings.

Neither feature covers everything, and knowing the gaps saves you from concluding the setting broke.

Color filters are applied to the screen as Windows composes it, so they cover nearly everything you see — including apps that ignore every other display setting. The exceptions:

  • The sign-in screen. Your filter applies after you sign in. The lock screen and sign-in screen use the accessibility options available from the icon in the bottom-right corner of that screen.
  • Hardware-accelerated and protected video. Some full-screen video players and streaming apps hand frames straight to the graphics card. Those frames arrive on screen unfiltered. Playing the same video in a browser window usually restores the filter.
  • Screenshots taken through Game Bar. A capture from the Snipping Tool or Print Screen reflects what you see, filter included — so the colleague you send it to sees your filtered colours, not the app's. Game Bar captures (Windows + Alt + PrtScn) record the raw frame from the app instead, which comes out unfiltered. Check which tool you used before you decide the filter misbehaved.
  • The other end of a remote session. The filter runs on your computer, so it colours the remote desktop window on your screen. It does not follow you onto the remote machine, and it is not applied to anything that machine prints or exports.

Contrast themes depend on each app respecting system colours:

  • Apps built with standard Windows controls — File Explorer, Settings, Notepad, most of Office — follow the theme fully.
  • Apps that draw their own interface may follow it partly or not at all. Images, photos, and video always keep their original colours, since a theme changes interface colours rather than content.
  • Websites change noticeably. With a contrast theme active, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome switch to forced-colours rendering, which strips a site's palette down to your theme's colours. Some sites look broken as a result. In Edge you can turn this off per-site from Settings > Accessibility > Show all web content in high contrast colors.

6. Finish the Job with Text Size and Pointer Contrast ​

Pair the color settings with the size and pointer options that solve the rest of the problem.

Colour is rarely the only thing making a screen hard to read. Two settings sit next to these and finish the job:

  1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Text size. Drag the Text size slider and watch the sample sentence above it. Click Apply. This enlarges text everywhere in Windows without blurring icons the way display scaling can.
  2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and touch. Choose Black or Inverted for the pointer style, or pick Custom and select a colour that no application uses. Drag the Size slider to make it larger.
  3. On the same page group, open Text cursor and turn on Text cursor indicator, then pick a bright colour. The blinking cursor gains coloured caps at each end, so you stop losing your place in a long form.

Tip: A colour filter changes only what you see. The chart you send to a colleague still relies on the same red and green it always did, and it is still unreadable for the roughly one in twelve men and one in two hundred women with a colour-vision difference. Fixing that means fixing the document — see How to Check Documents for Accessibility in Office.

Troubleshooting ​

TIP

Turn on the Windows + Ctrl + C shortcut in Step 3 before you spend time tuning a filter. Being able to flip the filter off and on instantly is the only reliable way to judge whether it is helping with a particular document.

Symptom / ErrorPotential CauseSolution
Color filter turns itself off after a restartFilter set from the shortcut, not SettingsSet the filter on the Color filters page in Settings rather than toggling it with Windows + Ctrl + C. The page setting persists across restarts.
Windows + Ctrl + C does nothingShortcut toggle disabled, or another app captured the keysTurn on Keyboard shortcut for color filters (Step 3). If it still does nothing, close any keyboard remapping utility and try again outside a remote desktop window.
Contrast theme makes an app look brokenApp draws its own interface coloursTry a different theme from the dropdown — Night sky and Aquatic break differently. If the app stays unusable, set the theme to None and use Grayscale or Inverted color filters instead.
Websites lose all their coloursBrowser forced-colours mode is activeThis is the contrast theme working as designed. In Edge, go to Settings > Accessibility and turn off Show all web content in high contrast colors.
Video plays in original colours while everything else is filteredPlayer uses a hardware video overlayPlay the video in a browser tab instead of the dedicated app, or turn off hardware acceleration in the player's settings.
Second monitor is not filteredDisplay connected through a different graphics adapterConnect both displays to the same adapter or dock, then sign out and back in. Confirm both appear in Settings > System > Display.