[Syzygy]

This is probably a simple mistake as I am new to theming, but why am I getting all my inactive items darkened with black boxes around the text?

Example

And yeah, it's like that when I install it, not just in theme preview.

[Hi I'm Mike]

your transparent and mask ****.

[dws]

Here's a quick way to take a normal widget and create its disabled counterpart::

Copy the opaque and transparent images of a widget; and then, in Photoshop (or any modern image processing application) do Levels and change the output from 255 to around 128. Cutting it in about half makes for a very nice ghost image; that works regardless of what colors are used in the original image and whatever you might be using for a background color.

Play around with the output level until you get just the affect that works the best for your theme. Once you've found a sweet spot, you can set up a Photoshop action or Fireworks command to help automate the process (though be careful of depending on automation, since you might find that some widgets look better with a little less transparency than others).

[Syzygy]

Originally posted by dws:
Here's a quick way to take a normal widget and create its disabled counterpart::

Copy the opaque and transparent images of a widget; and then, in Photoshop (or any modern image processing application) do Levels and change the output from 255 to around 128. Cutting it in about half makes for a very nice ghost image; that works regardless of what colors are used in the original image and whatever you might be using for a background color.

Play around with the output level until you get just the affect that works the best for your theme. Once you've found a sweet spot, you can set up a Photoshop action or Fireworks command to help automate the process (though be careful of depending on automation, since you might find that some widgets look better with a little less transparency than others).

Wow... thanks. A bit weird how the composite looks perfect except for the inactive, otherwise I would have tried fooling around with the colors more.

[solidfox]

There's also an easy way to make a transparency map in photoshop (especially) just make the image with transparency in psp then deactivate any background layers you may have, select all and push (command+shift+c) paste this copy and apply a white color overlay on the new layer created.

Then just (command shift c) both the white version and the colorversion of your image with a black background and you have your two images.