Panel and UI Customisation

Beyond layouts, Lightworks lets you tune the interface itself - its colours, control styles, and the small visual choices that add up over a long day in the edit. Most of it lives in the User Interface Appearance panel, opened from the Settings menu.

The Appearance panel

The User Interface Appearance panel adjusts the look of the application with a live sample (panel title, text, buttons) so you can judge changes before committing:

• Window colour, text colour, and accent colour set the palette; auto colourise derives a scheme for you.
• Sliders - choose the slider handle style (filled or outlined circle) and its point-of-interest marker (dot or line).
• Transport controls - outlined or solid play/stop button styling.
• Asset type indicators - the badge that marks clips, sequences, and syncs in bins, as a square or a ribbon.
• Rows - list-row styling (inset, light, or dark).

Click Use new settings to apply. You can save settings as a preset, so different looks - a dark grading room setup, a bright daylight one - are a click apart.

The Toolbox and the desktop (Flexible layout)

In Flexible layout, the Toolbox holds the tools you use to build a workspace, and its settings button (bottom of the panel) opens UI Preferences - a panel organised into Tools, Toolbox, UI options and Appearance.

Each tool in the Toolbox carries a caption - Import, Content, Edit, Mixer, Search, Export and In / Out - so you can tell them apart at a glance. Turn the captions off with Show Tool labels in UI Preferences > Toolbox; with them off, the tools show tooltips instead.

In / Out is a single tool covering both directions of SDI: click it and choose Record or Playout. It is always in the Toolbox, so where there is no capture hardware the menu still opens with both options greyed out.

Dragged tools out across the desktop and lost track of them? Return Tools to Toolbox in UI Preferences > Toolbox gathers them all back in, for the room you are in.

The desktop wallpaper

UI Preferences > Appearance sets the backdrop behind the Flexible layout desktop. Nothing is applied until you press Apply, so you can try a look before committing to it.

• Window colour is the colour behind everything else. It is derived from your theme, and follows the theme as you change it.
• The image chooser offers your own picture file, Logo 1, Logo 2, or None.
  • Logo 1 is a small logo tucked into the bottom-right corner. This is the default.
  • Logo 2 is a large logo across the middle of the desktop.
• Logo brightness sets how far the logo stands out from the colour behind it: 0 leaves it the same colour, +100 takes it to white, -100 to black. The default of -50 gives a logo that reads as a watermark rather than a graphic.
• Auto colourise image tints your own picture to match the theme.
• Stretch to fit scales a picture to the desktop rather than tiling it.

Note: The logo wallpaper used to be the large centred one, which is now Logo 2. Settings saved before this change open on Logo 1, the corner logo - so if you preferred the large logo, pick Logo 2.

This is the application desktop, and is separate from the per-project wallpaper described below.

Layouts do the heavy lifting

The shape of the interface - which panels are where - is layout territory: fixed layout tabs, the layout chooser, and the layout designer are covered in Layouts and workspaces. Between appearance presets and saved layouts, an entire personal setup is reproducible on any machine (see Application preferences for exporting preferences).

Other visual choices worth knowing

• Project wallpaper - In flexible mode, each project can have its own backdrop (Details tab of the project settings), a surprisingly effective cue when juggling several projects. This is separate from the application desktop wallpaper described above.
• Timeline appearance - track heights, waveform and keyframe visibility, and the timeline map are per-timeline display options (see Sequences and timelines).
• Hints and tooltips - the guidance layer can be switched off once you know your way around (see Application preferences).

Tip: Make the accent colour genuinely yours - it marks active states across the interface, and a colour you notice instantly makes the UI read faster.