I was tasked with the creation of a skin to match a company's brand colors.  I'm sure many of you have had a similar assignment.  I decided to use the stock iMaginary skin and modify the colors.  I thought this skin in particular handled coloring very well.  I hated to see all of that effort put into creating selection channels on the images wasted on a single project.  As I spent one evening after another encircling pixels, I decided to create a script that automates Photoshop and reuses the images.  This, of course, turned into a significant project of its own, but I'm pretty sure it will prove valuable to some of you out there.  I sure hope so.

For your skinning convenience: DXeasySkin (follow link for screenshots and download)

Requires a licensed or trial version of Photoshop CS3 or CS4 on Windows or a Mac (not yet tested on Mac).

Let me know if you run into problems.  Feedback is welcome.

- Corey

I haven't used it yet - but just wanted to say thank-you for sharing this!

-- Alex Hoffman
expressapp.blogspot.com

Corey,

  Great work and like Alex said, "Thanks for sharing!"  Kudos.

Bob

"Corey Meredith_1" wrote in message news:239773@community.devexpress.com...

I was tasked with the creation of a skin to match a company's brand colors.  I'm sure many of you have had a similar assignment.  I decided to use the stock iMaginary skin and modify the colors.  I thought this skin in particular handled coloring very well.  I hated to see all of that effort put into creating selection channels on the images wasted on a single project.  As I spent one evening after another encircling pixels, I decided to create a script that automates Photoshop and reuses the images.  This, of course, turned into a significant project of its own, but I'm pretty sure it will prove valuable to some of you out there.  I sure hope so.

For your skinning convenience: DXeasySkin (follow link for screenshots and download)

Requires a licensed or trial version of Photoshop CS3 or CS4 on Windows or a Mac (not yet tested on Mac).

Let me know if you run into problems.  Feedback is welcome.

- Corey

 

 

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http://community.devexpress.com//forums/p/70382/239773.aspx#239773

 I haven't used this, and i'm not a huge skin guy, but I definitely appreciate the effort you put in on this. Thanks for sharing with everyone!

Thanks for sharing with us!

Cheers,
Holger

Nice work !

Thanks for sharing.

Emmanuel

Thanks for your posts.  I'm looking forward to hearing about the results.  Anyone use the script yet?

Cheers, Corey

Corey,

Thanks for sharing! your Future Enhancements are cool, one thing popped up in my mind, say there is an active application an automated tool can grab the color of window, active elements, main elements, selections on the fly. and generates the look and feel similar to the existing application.

Thanks,

Vinod

Hi Vinod,

Thanks for the feedback!  Once I see that more people are getting some use out of the script, I'll work on the enhancements.

The functionality that you suggested for a tool that attempts to automatically reproduce the look of another application is interesting.  Such things are certainly beyond the scope and abilities of Adobe's Extendscript, however it would certainly be possible to write a Win32 application that could do some version of your idea.  As far as it being fully automatic, I'm not sure how you'd easily identify which parts of another application would translate to the interface element groupings that I've implemented (beyond the window frame).  Something that might be more feasible, yet equally valuable/convenient, would be to allow the user to simply point to a place on the screen and pick up the color similar to the eye dropper tool in Photoshop.  This would still require writing a companion tool and facilitating communication between the script and tool, but I could see it happening.

In the meantime, short of taking a snapshot of the screen and pasting it into an application like Photoshop to determine the colors of an existing application, there are many tools out there that try to make it easy to determine the color of any pixel on your screen. Do a search for color capture utilities.  Here's a free example: http://www.greeneclipse.com/eclipsepalette.html

Take care, Corey

How difficult would it be to use a different "base" skin?

Hi Seth,

In the script's current form, there's no support for using different base skins.  It would not be very difficult to add the functionality, but it would be a little time consuming.  I would need to refactor the script to support any skin based on some simple metadata that describes the elements in the skin, which files to color and the parts of the files to color, and what to change in the skin.xml file.  Then, I'd need to create the Photoshop image files for the new skin and create the metadata for both skins.

I've listed this feature as a future enhancement.  If I hear enough people asking for different skins, I'll think about investing the time.  I've been anticipating this question, but you're the first. :)  Which skin were you thinking about?

- Corey

Hi,

First  of all thank you for sharing this tool with the community. Like Seth, I'd be interested in using different base skins. I was mostly thinking about customising the Blue or the Money Twins skins.

Thanks