When Apple moved from Snow Leopard to Lion, all the Finder window graphics became much duller. The enabled states of buttons in the Finder, System Preferences, all over the GUI, became much harder to determine.
This has not been fixed in Mountain Lion. Is there a way to make difference between the button states of enabled and disabled much more visible?
The ones of particular interest are the Forward/Back ones in Finder windows.
Short answer: Install Snow Leopard.
Long answer: The only way I can think of is a pain.
The images used in Finder's UI are stored in the Resources directory of the application package.
Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder/Contents/Resources/
You can find the offending graphics that don't suit your taste and edit them directly.
After modifications restart Finder using the following command in a Terminal window:
killall Finder
