Transparent notification bar after Android 4.3 Update on Samsung Galaxy S3 I've just updated my Galaxy S3 to the OTA 4.3 update and whilst its fine, there are a couple of really annoying niggles.

The main one is the notification bar at the top - where the little icons are shown. This used to be black with white icons and they were easily visible.

Now its transparent. 

I use a nice landscape image as my wallpaper, so I have pale blue sky and white clouds, and you can imagine the white icons on white cloud background isn't exactly what I'd call usable. short of editing my wallpapers to have a black bar at the top, is there a way to revert this?

It seems the update is fine but for the lock screen that has so many pointless changes that result in usability problems I'm tempted to downgrade.
From what you said in the comments above, there is a way to change the text colour &amp; the icon colours along with the colour / transparency of the status bar.

It requires a rooted phone unfortunately but once rooted download WANAM Xposed from the play store here is a link Wanam Xposed work's on Samsung Android 4.2+ so you shouldn't have any issues

Once this is installed it will ask you to install the Xposed Framework, don't be alarmed it is required and will not harm your phone. Once the framework is installed you'll be prompted to enable Wanam Xposed from the new Xposed Installer, if not you can simply click on Xposed Installer, Click Modules and Wanam Xposed should appear and check the checkbox.

Now go on Wanam Xposed, note everytime you make a change it will only appear after a Reboot!

You can now go on Theme and click either Background Color (or Colour as it should be :) ) and this will enable you to select a colour for the status bar, or you can click on the following 


Circle Battery Color
Stock Battery Text color
Signal Icons Color
Clock And Date Color
Status bar icons color (remaining icons)


Each of these will change the icons instead of the status bar background colour

Hope this helps!