hi

i have been working for some time now as a Jasc PSP novice, trying my hand at editing the CrystalThin visual style elements, using StyleBuilder only.

The thing is, even doing the simplest task is driving me mad, due to unwanted results. I know it takes time to become a master, but this is just ridiculous!  

i am trying to make a 'black' theme for myself, and i have succeeded in changing background colors and so on, such as the taskbar. the problem is, if you look closely, you can see what appear to be horizontal streak marks in the gradient. i know this is how gradients are formed, but it's as if i made the gradient and saved the image in a very low format.

in order for me to even think about replacing the images' background with a gradient in psp, i find i always have to 'increase the image color depth' to 16 million colors before i can make a gradient - otherwise the gradient looks more like a bunch of zoomed-in pixels.

what i would like to know is, am i saving the image incorrectly? do i have to increase the bit's per pixel? or what do i have to do to make the streakiness go away? here's a sample image of how the toolbarbackground.bmp displays (from within Stylebuilder) of what i mean. i changed the basic background of the said image into black, and this is a screen-capture of how it actuallly appears. the horizontal streakiness is clearly visible.

I hope somebody can explain to me where i am going wrong, because this image editing stuff is driving me nuts...!

Welcome to Crystal XP

I have never been very good with StyleBuilder but I will try to help you out , I think there has been a wrong margin alignment for the image which you have set for 'Standard Buttons background' try changing the position of 'Bottom' and 'Top' margins.

Also provide a zip file containing all the resource files for the Visual Style

Enjoy your stay

Ok, so here's the latest.

I tried editing the margin values and for the most part it seems to get rid of the streakiness. You said that the margin alignment was 'wrong' but there doesn't seem to be a 'correct' value to set it as, maybe you could tell me what those are? As far as I can tell, using different margin alignment values result in a slightly different gradient effect.
(in case you are wondering, the taskbar background i nicked from the VistaCG vistual style...it's just temporary.)

My next two problems are as follows. One is I don't know how to make a button have a transparent background. The 'logoff' and 'shut down' buttons for example, have annoying backgrounds no matter what I do, even though i tried changing the bmp to a png file and it STILL has a visible background...a little advice here would help!

Finally, there is this funny menu font color issue. I managed to change the font color of menus in programs such as Notepad etc., and the statusbar font color, but look at this screencap of Opera - the font remains black on a black background gradient. I have set opera to Windows Native theme, with System Color Scheme selected, but they haven't changed. Any ideas what's happening? (don't forget to look at the whole of the image)

Anyway, here's the .msstyles file - just double-click it and select the CrytalThin Flag 2 Theme, it's the black theme I'm working on. Don't ask me why it works without shellstyle files, just trust me!
CODEhttp://www.megaupload.com/?d=EJY68JZK

[P.S. thanks for the help already ]

For the shutdown and log-off buttons problem , you should remember that Visual Styles supports only bitmap images even in many of the cases when transparency is required.The shutdown and log-off buttons are mostly preferred to have round-edges , the problem strikes here , if you make a circular or an image with round corners then you will left some of the pixels of your rectangular document with an unfilled space .When you will save the file as bitmap image . these unfilled spaces will not considered as transparency (as in PNG images) but they will filled automatically by white color which will result in a pink outline when you will use it in a visual style.
To fix this problem , you need to fill the background of the image with a specific range of pink color (R:255 B:0 G:255 = FF00FF) , this color on a bitmap image will be recognized as transparent and you will get a good button with round-edges .

For the Opera problem , let me tell you one thing , many browsers other than IE seem to show incompatibility with Windows' own Visual Style or theme that's the reason why there are many themes available for popular browsers like Opera and Firefox.
Opera's text color has been set to black and your toolbar and menu images are black too , you can change the color of the font for your explorer but who will do that for Opera?Actually there seems no solution of this problem unless you know how to edit/modify Opera skins.
You can fix your Opera problem  by doing this:

Open Opera browser and go to 'Tools->Appearance' select Opera Standard and apply it (see this image) :

The megaupload does not seem to work on our network , so I am unable to work on your modified VS by myself , just provide me the original visual style and I will work on it and see whether I encounter the same problem

Thanks ASHAR, I've sent the theme to your yahoo email, hope you got it ok.

Regarding the transparent bitmap image color, i might be wrong but i thought it (the background) was already made transparent. I'll check up on this and let you know.

I tested the Crystal Thin (1)  theme and tried to edit the Standard buttons background bitmap file (ToolbarBackground.bmp) with this image and found no problem   , here's the preview of my window on which the edited theme is applied.What I took care of is that I made the modified (ToolbarBackground.bmp) image exactly of the same dimension as the original one , I didn't even change the margins.

If you still face any problem in setting your modified image as background image for "Standard Buttons' , then do this:

Open 'My Computer' or any folder and take a screenshot of it (Alt+PrintSc) , paste it in a new document in Photoshop (or any other editor) , now make a selection over this part of the pasted screenshot and move it in an other document of exactly the same height as the selection (the width doesn't matter much) .On this selected part , you can work directly to get the exact results , just remember to set the Tile option for the "SizingType" property of the modified image to be placed for background (See this image) , try this image as an example

Well yes, it seems to have been the margin settings. Weird thing though, is that all the images are set to 'stretch' (as opposed to 'tile'. Well that seems to have sorted that out anyway, so thanks a lot.

There is of course the problem of how to make these images/backgrounds and so on. When I open different themes I keep getting conflicting results. The CrystalThin theme, for example, has most (if not all, I haven't looked) of its images in 8-bit mode. If I want to edit these, I have to convert to 24-bit (16 million colors). If I save in this format, nothing special seems to happen. In another theme I opened, the images were set at 256-colors again 8-bit). Am I missing something here? Do certain images have to be saved in specific color depths to work properly according to their function?

Last but not least, is how to make these images - I mean the actual skills involved in getting a particular result. As an example, windows XP interface has curved edges. I don't mean curved lines, just images with modified edge colors that give the appearance of a curved edge. How are these made? I'm finding it hard to even get any help on this with Google. Is there an area on this site that specifically deals with this?

Thanks for all the help so far, it has allowed me to progress so far into visual style editing faster than I could have expected.

Although this is not what you are looking for, but this tutorial might give you extra information which will come in necessary.