The colors thread (show us your color themes) [Alaska only]

George Wrote:That's a nice one, Juanflaco. I just installed it and apart from the icons on my home 1 screen it works flawless. How do I get those fancy icons of yours?

Did you perhaps set up custom background files or folders for Home 1? If so, I think you'll need to reset them to default in order to see the theme backgrounds. Let me know if that works for you.

@gekados: Yeah, the OSD title is pretty dark, but I settled at a point I like based on my lighting conditions. Once you've made some changes which work for you, would you post a screenshot along with the lines you changed? I'm sure others will want to tweak that as well.

@sandman4sure: Although it's a fairly straightforward process, I don't have it scripted and there are a few manual decision points along the way. I'll briefly describe the process, and then so as to keep clutter out of this thread, anyone with questions can PM me. I'll be happy to elaborate.

Here's how I did the Home 2 icons. I use Gimp, so terminology may vary but you should have no trouble doing this in photoshop...

1. Start with a source image. For music I used the Klipsch RF-62s here; might be a good one to practice with. First resize your source so the pieces you want fit nicely on a 512 x 512 canvas.

2. Add an alpha channel if your image doesn't already have one.

3. Remove the background using wand or whatever selection tools are required. This needs to be done early as future steps depend on having the main image isolated against a transparent background.

4. Colors > Colorify to convert to greyscale.

5. Colors > threshold. This will convert your greyscale to large areas of black and white depending on how you adjust the two sliders.

6. Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha. This will erase all the white areas of your image.

7. Splat it up! Use a variety of brushes to paint and erase until you get a distressed painted look.

8. Gaussian Blur, 2px by 2px to soften the edges a bit.

9. That's it, save your icon as a .png to maintain transparency and you can use them on Home 2. The home 1 icons are easy, I just pasted the home 2 icon over a concrete image and saved as a 640 x 360 .jpg

Again, I'm happy to get into more detail over PM if anyone has questions.

Very nice theme

Are you using the latest Github build?

scrolling Wrote:Very nice theme

Text is showing fine for me.

scrolling Wrote:Very nice theme

Yep, you'll need to grab a newer Alaska build from github. The flags have changed. The missing flags you've circled are now transparent so the background shows through, and the rating / year text will show up darker (same color as the other flags.)

For anyone who is interested, I've updated/tweaked the Red Slate, Blue Slate, & Blue Mosaic themes to (hopefully) make the text a little more visible as well as changed a few colors here & there.

Check the MediaFire link in my signature.

Hitcher Wrote:Are you using the latest Github build?

Juanflaco Wrote:Yep, you'll need to grab a newer Alaska build from github. The flags have changed. The missing flags you've circled are now transparent so the background shows through, and the rating / year text will show up darker (same color as the other flags.)

Thanks that worked.

Juanflaco Wrote:Did you perhaps set up custom background files or folders for Home 1? If so, I think you'll need to reset them to default in order to see the theme backgrounds. Let me know if that works for you.

That did it, thanks!

Just a small color mod

Juanflaco Wrote:Ok, here's another one to play around with. As always, big thanks to Hitcher for the inspiration and a great skin to work with, and the other helpful folks around here who helped me figure things out along the way.

Stencil

Very nice. Always like your theme ideas.