Mix match your themes with your skins

I need an icon package for my skin!

Published on October 1, 2003 By Adam Najmanowicz In IconDeveloper Help

So you have that cool skin you've always dreamed about. It's smooth, it's great, it's beautifull, and it absolutely does not come along with your favorite icon package. Damnit! You look at the skin, then you look at the icon package... can't decide which one you should get rid of? No problem any longer. Match your icon package go smothly with your skin.

As you will see, my skin of choice for now is dark olive. It's a recolored (with SkinStudio of course

) Reluna Visual Style (ported for my own usage with SkinStudio) and the icon package I will try to match is Paul Boyer's (Mormegil) PixOs.

The Icon package recoloring - File->Open dialog

The Icon package recoloring - File->Open dialog

Yes. IconDeveloper now lists icon packages in its skin tree that it displays on Tools->Browse IconPackager themes. So I select the PixOs Package and press the "Recolor" button which the hand points to (you could also just double click the theme or press the "Edit" button on the toolbar as usual. Notice that there is also "Edit" button on the left of the cursor taking you to IconPackager if you wanted to make any changes to your theme, and "Apply" button for your convenience that applies the package you have selected (IconPackager is required for that option to work).
Ok so let's press "Recolor".

The Icon package recoloring - recolored theme name selection dialog

The Icon package recoloring - recolored theme name selection dialog

So now IconDeveloper asks how you want to name the recolored theme. I called it "PixOs Olive" since I'll try to make it... Olive. Press [OK] and wait for IconDeveloper to pre-process the icons for you. Notice that the whole process is totally harmless for your original theme. IconDeveloper will never write anything to the original theme neither will it allow you to keep the name of the theme so that you did not break it by mistake.

So we have it loaded and IconDeveloper shows you the list of the icons your theme consists of.
The Icon package recoloring - Step 2

let's select the color we want to use as the source color (meaning basically the color we wat to get rid of). Press the eyedropper button pointed at by the cursor on the picture above and select a darker shade of blue on one of the icons like on the picture below:

The Icon package recoloring - Step 2

oh... IconDeveloper adjusted all the sliders to transform the dark blue into the color that is shown below the source color (called "Target color"). "Target color" is the color we want the source color to become after the transformation.

The Icon package recoloring - Step 3

Notice that the right version of each icon changed according to the settings IconDeveloper picked for recoloring. But I do not want my icons to look like that! It's not looking nice because I have not yet specified what i want my source color to become. Let me do that now. I click on the eyedropper next to the target color (the one that is pointed at by the hand on the picture above) and i pick a color from the titlebar as the target color. Like on the picture below:

The Icon package recoloring - Step 4

Great! Now my icons are ideal right? Not exactly. Look at the picture below. Especially on the places the hands point at. I don't want those poor people to have blue faces, not I wish to have an abstract blue sunset with red hills on my icons.

The Icon package recoloring - Step 5

What i need to do is to do is to limit the appliance of recoloring to only affect the "blues" and leave the rest of the colors alone. This is done pretty similar to how it's done in Photoshop. You take that "Fuzziness" trackbar that's been af 100% up until now (look at the pictures above) making IconDeveloper to recolor 100% of the visible spectrum and limit it only to shades of blue (the ones similar to "source color" we want to get rid of). Let's drag it to 10%.

The Icon package recoloring - Step 6

Now we're at home! notice how the people are back and healthy (not zombie like before)? And the sunset... Perfect!

You may fine tune the colors to your liking now. Just try to stay away from the top most slider as it defines the original color and if you move it, you'll turn your people into zombies again (not to mention the sunset). Go ahead pull the levers!

Comments

mormegil

on Oct 01, 2003

This is a great new feature! Love the Preview mode.

TasT

on Oct 01, 2003

Excellent new feature maybe now I can have the Grayscale Faux-SX Icons that I've always dreamed about..

JeremyG

on Oct 01, 2003

Very very cool....i can now have Orion icons in purple!!!!!

docx

on Oct 02, 2003

Thai is great!! Thanks for shareing this!!

Jeff Kohrt(AKA: Pentiumbuster)

on Oct 02, 2003

This is great and will be very useful- - however I did not see - -is there going to be a way of adding texture ie., woodgrain,stucco, etc.? or do the icons have to already be textured.

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 03, 2003

Jeff Kohrt,
this is a great idea, I can do it!
Adam Najmanowicz switches [Code] mode.

inazuma002

on Oct 05, 2003

whadup, im new at this and this helps me a lot. thanks!

Melchiah

on Dec 26, 2003

Why is it that I never see any of the images posted in your articles?

Alex

on Jan 12, 2004

916 717-7814 call me

ALEX

on Jan 12, 2004

CALL ME 9160717-7814

Adam Najmanowicz

on Jan 13, 2004

inazuma002, it was my account hosting the images beeing broken, sorry about that, should be all fixed now

Adam Najmanowicz

on Jan 13, 2004

actually it was for Melchiah

adsadadda

on Apr 20, 2004

aaaaa

FlaminArowz

on Oct 30, 2004

Looks like too much work for me -- isn't there anything eaier and better that works with XP? I used to Have Desktop Srchitect for ME .. But this XP is new .. and the skins are the eost! - so are thr Icons

Adam Najmanowicz

on Jan 07, 2005

There is only a few steps to it. I am not sure if it can be any easier.

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