Is there a way to tell Skin Studio's theme bitmaps to use system colours?

from WinCustomize Forums

Hi all,

Basically I'm trying to create a recolourable skin where you can change the colours by changing the System Colours option in WindowBlinds. 

So far, I've only been able to achieve this by using transparencies (e.g. using transparent button faces, tab backgrounds, etc.) which allows the default system background (with the predefined system colours) to show through them. But this causes issues and undesirable colouring in other areas of the theme (like combobox buttons) which can be a pain to fix using workarounds, or impossible to address like in tabs. Picture below to illustrate what I mean.

Using transparency to show system colours produces side effects

My question is, is there a way to tell Skin Studio/WindowBlinds to use the defined system colours to colour UI elements? A line of code perhaps or a special "magic" colour?

Thanks.

windowblinds
4,690 views 5 replies
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top

As far as I know there is no way to do what you're asking.

I'd suggest that you might look closely at the re-coloring options within the WB "modify style" page, there are a few settings in there which can yield different results as opposed to just clicking on a color tile.  Other than brightness, it all is based on hue-shifting though, the skin does need to have color in it.

CursorFX - Customize your Windows cursor
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Ah that's too bad. I'm not very well versed in colour theory. Which base colour should I use that would allow the widest variation in colours through hue shifting? 

Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top

I'm not sure there's really a "best".  Mainly I'd go sort of in the mid-range in terms of brightness for re-coloring, unless you absolutely like bright or dark.

The best thing to do might be to pick a color that you might want to use often, then just make a taskbar in that color and see if it recolors the way you want it to within WB.

Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Quoting DaveRI, reply 4

I'm not sure there's really a "best".  Mainly I'd go sort of in the mid-range in terms of brightness for re-coloring, unless you absolutely like bright or dark.

The best thing to do might be to pick a color that you might want to use often, then just make a taskbar in that color and see if it recolors the way you want it to within WB.
End of DaveRI's quote

Thanks for your input. I've discovered that if you colour your skin with one pure RGB colour (e.g. 255 blue) you could use the hue bar to get pretty much any other colour on the spectrum, so that might be the way forward.