David, sorry, I overlooked your citation of the mathematica.stackexchange item, and I didn't recall having seen it there. Thanks for your digging!

Danko Georgiev: How did you discover the value "ClassicLights" optional 2nd entry for PlotTheme? I ask because I find no mention of it on the doc page for PlotTheme. And, although it may be buried there, I didn't find it on the doc page for Plot3D, either.

Dear David, I wanted to clarify a bit my previous point because it was misunderstood. I wrote "documentation of new Mathematica 10" and I was trying to stress on the "new" in that expression. Mathematica 9 has nice "old" documentation center, which provides good and consistent information. When an old user goes to the new documentation center online of version 10, he is probably not looking for the content that Wolfram team carried over from the old documentation 9, rather he expects to find additional instructions on what is "new" in this new version 10. In this sense I think Wolfram team has done some advertising on what is new, but have not done a great job in documenting it.

I agree that the documentation of new Mathematica 10 is terrible. I have visited the online documentation and have tried finding an image of a plot using the Classic colors with the hope that I can find the correct code for solving the coloring problem. And easy enough I have found multiple images using the Classic colors, but when I executed the code in Mathematica 10 it produced yellow plots. So, I realized that Mathematica team maybe updated the texts of the documentation but did not change the images that they had produced using old version of Mathematica. For consistency, I think they should re-run all the codes in the new documentation online and produce new image outputs from Mathematica 10.

Dear David, thanks a lot! Your proposal works.

Before I post my question to the forum I actually tried to change the ColorTheme guessing that it should be the "Classic" one, yet the result was strange:

Plot3D[Exp[-x^2] + Exp[-y^2], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5}, PlotTheme -> {"Classic"}]

However, in your proposal, you add extra argument "ClassicLights", which indeed returns image that seems identical to one produced by old version of Mathematica:

Plot3D[Exp[-x^2] + Exp[-y^2], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5}, PlotTheme -> {"Classic", "ClassicLights"}]

Dear Isaac, none of the 51 options available returns color output that matches the one of old Mathematica versions. My question is not how I can play with the colors, but how to get exactly the same color function as in the old Mathematica.

Below is the "Rainbow" output.

I did try all of the following 51, just to verify that the color function used by default in old versions of Mathematica is not one of them: "AlpineColors", "Aquamarine", "ArmyColors", "AtlanticColors", "AuroraColors", "AvocadoColors", "BeachColors", "BlueGreenYellow", "BrassTones", "BrightBands", "BrownCyanTones", "CandyColors", "CherryTones", "CMYKColors", "CoffeeTones", "DarkBands", "DarkRainbow", "DarkTerrain", "DeepSeaColors", "FallColors", "FruitPunchColors", "FuchsiaTones", "GrayTones", "GrayYellowTones", "GreenBrownTerrain", "GreenPinkTones", "IslandColors", "LakeColors", "LightTemperatureMap", "LightTerrain", "MintColors", "NeonColors", "Pastel", "PearlColors", "PigeonTones", "PlumColors", "Rainbow", "RedBlueTones", "RedGreenSplit", "RoseColors", "RustTones", "SandyTerrain", "SiennaTones", "SolarColors", "SouthwestColors", "StarryNightColors", "SunsetColors", "TemperatureMap", "ThermometerColors", "ValentineTones", WatermelonColors"

Dear Isaac, I have modified my Kernel\init.m file but your suggestion did not do what I wanted. Let me write a simple example:

Plot3D[Exp[-x^2] + Exp[-y ^2], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5}]

If you execute this code, you will get white background and yellow-reddish surface. In previous versions of Mathematica the surface color was a kind of pale blue. In other words, I do not want to set the background to white, which it already is, I want to avoid the yellow coloring of the plotted surfaces. Please compare the output of the above code from Mathematica 10 and Mathematica 8/9: