For some reason, about 80% of the time I open my launcher (on OS X), it appears darker. I used to have a screenshot of the normal one, and the "darker" one, but I can't get the normal "light" one to show up again. The darkness caries over to the actual game, making menus and the gameplay look horrible and often too dark to see. Anyone else have this problem and know how to solve it?
Weird, this sounds like a problem I had in an old game when running with an nVidia video card... For some odd reason, the video card could not adjust the brightness for that version of OpenGL and the game was always dark. I eventually snagged onto an updated driver for my video card that fixed the problem... If you have an nVidia card, try updating your vid drivers. Or, backup your minecraft install and savegames and then re-download and see if a fresh install of Minecraft fixes the problem.
Launcher "Dark" Sometimes