Zenburn for Emacs is a direct port of the popular Zenburn theme for vim, developed by Jani Nurminen. It's my personal belief (and that of its many users I presume) that it's one of the best low contrast color themes out there and that it's is exceptionally easy on the eyes.

The theme has two versions - one for Emacs 23, relying on the color-theme package and another for Emacs 24 using the built-in theming support there.

Zenburn depends on the color-theme package, so you should have it installed. In zenburn's repo you'll find a stripped down version of color-theme (without the built-in themes), suitable for use with zenburn. Finally put this in your .emacs(or init.el):

(require 'color-theme-zenburn)
(color-theme-zenburn)

Zenburn for Emacs is also available for installation via the Marmalade package repository. Follow the installation instructions there to install package.el and afterwards you can install the zenburn theme like this:

M-x package-install color-theme-zenburn

Download zenburn-theme.el to the directory ~/.emacs.d/themes/. Add this to your .emacs:

(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes/")

Now you can load the theme with the interactive function load-theme.

Solarized for Emacs is already bundled into Emacs Prelude. If you're a Prelude user - you're probably already using Zenburn, since it's Prelude's default color theme. You can load Zenburn at any time by M-x load-theme zenburn.

Please, report any problems that you find on the projects integrated issue tracker. If you've added some improvements and you want them included upstream don't hesitate to send me a patch or even better - a GitHub pull request. These contributors have done so.