With this tutorial you will be able to make your own desktop themes. No plug ins are need with this tutorial. All I used was my Paint Shop Pro 7 and my regular system tools. You can click on the image below and download a zip file which will have all of the images you will need in it. With that said let's get started on this project. It is really easy to do *S*.
Make a new folder and give it a name...I named mine autumn theme. Unzip the autumn theme zip and place items in there. Now to tell you how I got those items. I used my PSP and chose a picture that I wanted for the wallpaper. I opened it in my PSP and used my selection tool to select different parts of the picture that I wanted to use for my icons. Here I chose to use the dormer window, the chimney, the pumpkins and the light pole...after I chose those things with my selection tool I copied and pasted as a new image and then resized them to 50 x 50 and then did sharpen. Make sure when resizing that you UNcheck the "Maintain Aspect Ratio". These are the images I chose out of the image above....*note I made two icons for the recyle bin. One with smoke and one without for the empty or full. How I did this was to make the image with the smoke first and then used the clone tool (looks like a double paint brush) to cover over the smoke for the other image.
I saved these images as bitmap but I think you could save them as jpg's or gif's also. You are now ready to put your chosen images in a folder with the image that you chose to use for wallpaper and we are pretty much done with the PSP part. Nothing to it right?
Now go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Display and choose the effects tab.
Highlight the icon you want to change and then click on the "Change Icon" button. You will now see this...
Click on the browse...
Now you will change the file type to All Files and Look in: wherever you have saved the images you have made. Then click on the image you want on the icon you have highlighted and click open. Then you just highlight the next icon you want to change and follow the steps again to locate the image for that icon. After you have changed all of the icons click on apply.
I am sorry I forgot to tell you about setting the wallpaper. Just go to the background tab and browse to the folder where you have saved your wallpaper image and do apply for this also. That is it, you should now have your own personal desktop theme on your computer.
I hope that I haven't made it sound too confusing. If you have any problems with it, feel free to send me an e-mail and I will try to help *S*.