new to skinning; having some issues

You are not doing anything wrong. This is an important part of skinning windowblinds.

Images can be stretched or tiled depnding on your preference and the nature of the graphic. There are margin settings to adjust that will change where the images and what part of the image gets stretched or tiled. Up, down, left, and right margins need to be sett to have the image look the way you want.

If the image has gradients or texture it may require the image to be the very long so it matches your resolution to minimize the stretching width but it may look bad on other's systems with different resolution.

I suggest you peruse the Wincustomize Wikipedia for some tutorials. It will save you some time. http://wiki.wincustomize.com/wiki/Main_Page

Never mind

thank you. i'll take a look at the link at see what happens from here and let you guys know if i have any more problems.

Also take a look at the SKS tutorial.

https://www.stardock.com/products/skinstudio/help/

okay so i sorted out the stretching problem... i read the tutorials but there is nothing listed on this problem i have now. in skin studio it shows as transparent but when i load the windowblind it has white block borders. here is the url. is there a box i have to tick to remove this?

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/rr217/charlestannehill85/problem.jpg

Do you have "this image has alpha channel" checked?

Could the white part be the rebar image showing through?

best thing is to post ur skin on Sendspace or something, we can download it and advise, hard to tell other than perhaps u dont have alpha and trans. boxes checked or that your theme is.. high

oh man, where to start. very few people have been able to put together a competent blind their first attempt. there are a few but not many and I sure ain't one of them.

there is basic turorial help here as in the links above. and the forums are a great place to get specific answers to specific problems. most of what I learned I learned from looking at other people's skins to see how they accomplished whatever I was wanting to work on. In most cases I was able to learn throuigh trial and error and a lot of questions here.

alpha channels and gaussian blur function are a couple of favorite tools used by many. understanding how they work is essential in obtaining the "look" one desires. I get by with alpha channel results but I'm a long way from understanding how they can be manipulated.

reply #5 link I can't access, consider using whatever settings might be available to actually link and imbed your graphic into the post. might be helpful to mention your "favorite graphics program", how to and functionality will differ between programs and sometimes even versions.

people are pretty helpful here, ask, ask and ask again if needed. before your first submission ask those that have provided you with the most to take a look and see what they think. you are not alone.

I have found that people in the trade usually come up with some novel ideas, I look forward to your first submission.

well try this, it is the IMG code. i only use photobucket. sorry. and the program i use paint.net. i have photoshop cs3 extended but i don't really care for it. paint.net has been able to open any image and i have all the plugins needed for that program to do anything. all i did was open up the stock images they give you when start your first skin, modify them and save. and a lot of it i copied and pasted .pngs into it. but skinstudio 6 says it has support for .png's so i don't think thats the problem. and the theme isn't literall. it's just something different i decided to make. i get tired of the same themes over and over so i went with something fresh even though i don't condone drugs.

Skinartistry has a workshop for just this. Go there and upload your skin to the workshop. There are some very talented skinners there to assist you.

http://skinartistry2.com/news.php

i'm starting to think it's a problem with my actual windowblinds program because any skin i load does the exact same thing. i think i'm gonna reinstall and see if i get the same problem...

EDIT: so before i go to skin artistry i will try this first.

turns out i had to reinstall my windowblinds. for some reason i guess it didn't install right the first time. oh well, back to work!

Ill take a look at that tutorial Island.thanks

thanks for the links Guys...............

I was looking for a skin at WinCustomize and when I went to this page https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?skinid=574&libid=9 , I read "Here's another Windows Media skin I was able to create thanks to SkinStudio" which made me think that if I downloaded SS then I could make my own WM skin, so I downloaded SS. When I tried to open SS, I was told I needed WindowsBlinds, so I downloaded WB.

I know from WinCumstomize.com that "WindowBlinds changes the look and feel of your Windows Desktop by applying visual styles to your entire Windows environment. When a visual style is applied, they change nearly every elements of the Windows GUI such as title bars, push buttons, the Start bar, menu and more." I only want to change the Windows Media Player skin - not everything - but I don't see any option for only WM in the SS program and the HELP they provided is useless.

I have the shareware versions of SkinStudio and WindowsBlinds. 

 I only want to make a skin for my Windows Media Player. That's all.

Can I do that with one or both of those two programs without changing everything about my computer's design?

P.S. My computer is Windows XP

I'm not seeing the option to create a WMP skin in SkinStudio 6

I do see it in SKS 5

Don't recall if the free version of 5 allowed it....or if it had to be the pro version