MOD - Titan Color Themes (red, green, purple, gold) (1 Viewer)

[red_zebra]

As I can't really get used to the dazzling blue color in the Titan skin I just ran with creating some color themes for Titan. So here is the result.

For installing using the installer by @kiwijunglist:
1. download the theme archive and unzip the file
2. start install_[theme].bat - this will 1. copy all graphic files to the destination directory and 2. change all font colors in Titan .xml-files
Attention updaters! If you already installed the theme before you will lose any changes you have made on the .xml-files in the theme-subfolder since then, such as basichome-structure, menus, translations etc. - please be aware of that and better don't use the installer if you e.g. just want to update the graphics pack.

Here is a workaround to change the font colors manually, if you're afraid to use the installer:
1. collect all current used .xml-files and copy them to a temporary folder on your computer
2. open all copied .xml-files at once, for example in Notepad++
3. press STRG + H and do the font color replacements in all files (use the button "Replace All in All Opened Documents"). The specific color codes are listed in the readme.txt in each theme-pack. So e.g. for the Dark Red-theme enter (without quotation marks, so just the 6-digit color-code):
"00b7ff" --> "954035"
"6aa5cb" --> "c36256"
"6fafe1" --> "cd7d73"
"85cffe" --> "d79890"
"85cfff" --> "d79890" (note: I found this color just in a few .xml-files and guess this is a bug, as the color is quite similar to the previous one)
"a9d0f7" --> "e2b3ac"
"b2d4f5" --> "eccdc9"
4. save all files (again Notepad++ can do this with one click)
5. sort all .xml-files in your temporary folder by "date modified" to find these you have just modified with the replacement-workaround
6. paste the modified files in the ...\skin\Titan\Themes\[whatever theme you installed] directory - afterwards you can delete the untouched .xml-files in your temporary folder
7. In MediaPortal go to settings --> theme
8. if you still see anything blue: close MP, clear the skin-Cache and restart MP. If that still does not help, please post a comment with screenshot here
9. click on "Like", say "Thank you" or post some screenshots of your themed Titan skin

Screenshots:
Dark Red


Bright Red


Dark Purple


Deep Green


Dull Gold


Changelog:
- 2013-03-16 first try and initial release of dark red theme
- 2013-03-17 complete graphic rework and release of bright red, deep green and dark purple theme
- 2013-03-18 v1.1: included background graphics; bugfixes (added the correct theme.xml, added some missing graphics); release of dull gold theme
- 2013-03-20 v1.2: included installer (Thanks to @kiwijunglist); added some missing graphics (thanks to @Lichloathe)

To Do:
- keep on trying to create a white/light silver theme
- create a Photoshop-HowTo for other Themers
- wait for community-suggestions for new theme color packs
- enjoy my themed MediaPortal

 

[kiwijunglist]

Hi,

I moved your mod post to a separate thread. Please go back into the titan community themes thread post a description + screenshot(s) of your mod followed by a link to this thread. If any users have any questions / problems about your mod they can post in this thread rather than posting in the community mods thread. This will keep the community mods thread clean with mods only. If you have seen the streamedMP mods thread you will see that only 10% of the posts are actual mods, making it hard to find mods.

Thank you

 

[kiwijunglist]

PS. Is it really necessary to modify all the xmls, what happens if you only modify the colours in references.xml? If there are other colour codes throughout the skin it might actually be a bug and it might be worth while noting down which skin files don't use references.xml as this might be something that the titan team might look into changing, as it certainly makes custom themes a lot easier if you only need to alter references.xml, and it also means the theme can stay up to date when titan changes as you only need references.xml in your theme folder.

 

[red_zebra]

Yes, you are right, it should be defined in the references.xml only. But unfortunately it does not work on all pages (see screenshots attached - this is the theme with only the modified graphics and the references.xml). And as I have only a productive system without TV server and just a few (rather mainstream) plugins installed at the moment, I can not really figure out which .xml-files are "corrupted" by not being affected from color changes in the references.xml. What I figured out is that there are <textcolor>-definitions in dozens of .xml-files which is quite strange, as in my understanding of how skins work (I am quite a newbie here) all color definitions should be stored in variables, so there should not be any "hard" color definition in the format #xxxxxx in the .xml-files at all (comparable to the translations in the <label>-definitions: they are defined in strings_xx.xml and most of the skin just define "text number 2" instead of "Music"/"Musik"/"Musica"/etc.).

 

[kiwijunglist]

Attention @ncoH - Not sure if this is of interest to you or not, but there might be some titan xml files are not using references.xml for text colours (see above)

Obviously the advantage of all colour codes being in references.xml means that themes can have different colours and still work with skin updates. The other advantage being that themes are easier to make/change.

 

[l337]

did you edit each image individually ?

I would like to mix a different color, how do I do that?

If I have understood everything correctly

I must search through all xml files by color codes
and edit all skin png files with photoshop ?
so a change of color could also integrate SKIN so that you can adjust it by comfortable remote is this possible?
I saw this in xbmc....

 

[red_zebra]

did you edit each image individually ?
I would like to mix a different color, how do I do that?

Yes, but it wasn't that complicated and I didn't even used Photoshop but only Paint.net (actually I'm absolutely no master in graphic editing, so the following might appear a bit dilettantish). Most of the files you can just colorize (in paint.net the menu is "Hue/Saturation"). Now play around with the two bars "Hue" and "saturation" (better don't adjust "Brightness"), until you have found your favorite color. Write down these two settings and colorize all the other .pngs where you can see anything blue (you can also look in my theme-.zip to find out which graphics you have to edit). Now colorize all the graphics with the same settings and save them (better create a batch for this). The only "problem" is the few graphics with a static foreign element in it (like the green switch in the file "togglebutton_medium_on_focus.png"). Here you have to add the original element (can be found as separate file) as a new layer after colorizing the whole button.

Actually it would be nice if the original skin designers could upload the original files in .psd or other uncompressed format, so that it would be easier and more professional to colorize them, especially since every redesign according to "my method" means a loss in quality to the textures (you can see it e.g. in "defaultAudioBig.png").

If I have understood everything correctly I must search through all xml files by color codes

Unfortunately it seems so, as long the issue is not fixed that all skin files use the settings in references.xml

(Edit) For defining the target font colors I used the page http://www.colorhexa.com - here you can just enter a color which is the outcome of your colorization of the graphics and you will get the hex-code in format #xxxxxx and a section "Shades of #xxxxxx" which you can use as shaded font colors for the new theme.

so a change of color could also integrate SKIN so that you can adjust it by comfortable remote is this possible?

I saw this in xbmc....

If I understand you correctly, yes, if you have installed different themes you can switch them via the menu (in worst case you have to restart MP and clear the skin-cache)

 

[l337]

Thanks for the explanations​

Next week it will try to implement it as in my favorite color and post here ​

Batch conversion does not work with paint.net , is it right ?Irfanview can be excellent

 

[l337]

the problem is with Irfanview the transparency is lost of the pngs

gimp is better with davids batch processor

Totorial here

 

[red_zebra]

Okay, I definitely got addicted now . Thanks to Adobe's free download of Photoshop CS2 I played a bit with batch processes and effect layers and did a complete rework of the red theme (in much better graphics quality) and - somehow as a side effect - created three new themes: in addition to the dark red theme now there is also a brighter red theme, a purple theme and a green theme (I'd love to see/create a white theme, but this seems a bit more difficult without the original graphics/layers). Suggestions for font color settings are in the readme-file in each .zip-archive, there is also documented the setting in Photoshop, if there will be some more graphics to come which then have to be redesigned...

@kiwijunglist: I don't know if I should create a new thread for every color pack, especially since they are all based on the same creating and also installing routine... So could you please rename this tread to "Titan Color Themes" or anything like this? Thank you.