One item suggested by Romain a year ago and missing up until now in Substance was an option to add lighter inner border to different components. Here is a sample screenshot of a few controls under Windows Vista:

As you can see, pretty much all the controls have a lighter inner border. Look at the checkboxes, radio buttons, scroll bars and buttons. Note that even the highlight indication on the selected list item has a lighter inner border. This approach was adopted by Microsoft designers back in Windows Vista, and has found its way into a few Synthetica themes as well.

Finally, i got around into providing this functionality in the latest binary drops of Substance. A handful of core skins now use different kinds of inner border painters, and here are a few examples.

We’ll start with Autumn skin. Here is how it looked before:

And here is how it looks now:

As you can see, pretty much all the relevant controls have lighter inner borders, including buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, combos, text fields, scroll bars and tabs. Here is one more “before” shot under Autumn:

And here is the same application under the latest drop:

As you can see, you get consistent borders on the selected elements in lists and trees as well. This is due to the generic internal implementation of Substance border painting, which means that you get it on a very wide range of controls (including progress bars, text components, sliders and menus as well) for a very small increase in the library size.

Let’s move on to the Business skin. Here is the “before”:

And here is “after”:

Moving on to Creme skin, here is the “before”:

And here is the “after”:

Moving on to Raven Graphite skin, here is the”before”:

And the “after”:

And the last one is Raven Graphite Glass. The “before” screenshot:

And the “after”:

For more details on how to use the new inner border painter on custom Substance skins, read the source code of the relevant core skins mentioned above (until the documentation is ready).