MacOS Sonoma Menu bar color

The default Sonoma background has a very light sky, causing the menu bar to appear almost light gray. I changed to one of the "Earth" backgrounds as they all have black in the top of the image.

The menu bar is transparent. Most of the landscape backgrounds have sky in the top making the menu bar seem very light.

Choosing a wallpaper whose top portion is dark will fix that menu bar issue and the transparency works for you allowing that dark portion of the wallpaper to transform the menu bar to its proper dark coloration.

Two solutions:

• Use a dark/black background

or

• Reduce transparency in the Accessibility/Display settings

Happened to me too. That's because the new Sonoma wallpaper has a bright skyline regaerdeless of time of the day or dark mode selected.

As I don't like how menus appear with reduced transparency I switched back to old Ventura's wallpaper and then the horrible notch disappeared.

Here is the direct fix - I took a snapshot of my MacBook Pro desktop. I used Photoshop to open the snapshot, select the menu bar area precisely and fill it with my preferred menubar color: black.I inverted the selection and filled with a simple dark steel blue gradation gradation which is easy on my eyes. I made it the finder background in system settings:wallpaper. My image is loaded here - feel free to use it and cherish it forever - or make your own.

Interesting. I have turned "Reduce Transparency" on, which appears to have the desired effect of making the menu bar follow the light/dark theme. So now I can have the animated wallpapers cycling without worrying about being blinded at night!

The only way I've found to change the color of the menu to my liking so far is to select a dynamic wallpaper from System Settings -> Wallpaper. Some of them have darker menus (the Reduce Transparency option doesn't get the menu as dark as I like it to be).

This works better. Background with black fall off reduces the notch visibility a lot. Odly turning on "Reduce Transparency" makes the menu bar grey which I do not like.

So I have Night Mode on, Reduce transparency off and the Peak Dynamic Wallpaper. The motion screen savers are cool, leaving those cycling through until I get tired of it.

At the bottom of the Wallpaper System Setting panel I see an option that says "Colors". This seems to control the background of the menu bar and the dock.

The pale pinkish color that fills in the menu bar, tabs, and even on the normally white areas of websites, can be removed by unchecking "True Tone". Finder/Displays window, "True Tone" (... automatically adapt display to make colors appear consistent in different ambient lighting conditions.)

mattsz68 wrote:

when MacOS Ventura was installed on my MacBook, the color of the top menu bar was translucent and matched the color of the app. I just installed MacOS Sonoma, and it unfortunately is white, regardless of it being on dark mode, showing the notch a lot more than before. How do I change the color of the menu bar, or will it stay that way? Thanks

I don't see a user setting right off.

You can reduce transparency...

submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

To be clear, the Colors section of the Wallpaper pane of System Settings sets the chosen color as the wallpaper. It does NOT simply apply to the menubar and Dock.

YES!!! Good find - thanks!

Thank you ryan_ware you're a lifesaver! That would have bothered me and then I would have had to bury my laptop.