Creating Colours

If you can't figure out how to make colours, please read all this before emailing me.

  1. Colour Factory Explained
  2. Tutorial 1 - Creating my Classic Profile
  3. Tutorial 2 - Creating my LCD Profile (I got more email on this than this...)

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Colour Factory Explained

Set
In the upper left hand corner you find the Set group box. This selects the group of colours to edit. Bars is the frequency bars, Peak is the peak indicators, and Flash is the Background Flash. The terminology for Flash comes from my first background style (Flash). Flash would probably be better named Background, but the word 'background' won't fin in that tiny box. :)

Selected Colour
In the upper right you see the Selected Colour. This is the current colour you are working with. You can easily modify the colour by using the red, green, and blue sliders or click on the Pick Colour button to bring up that oh so familiar colour picker.

Colour Ramp Controls
There is a set of controls at the left and right side of the colour ramp consisting of a slider, a Get button, and a Put button. The slider chooses which colour to edit. At the top of the slider the colour number is displayed. Click Get to get the Selected Colour for the colour that the slider is positioned at. Click Put to make the colour the slider is pointing to the Selected Colour.

Fade
Click the Fade button to create a smooth fade between the 2 colours the sliders are positioned at. This is the real power of creating a nice colour ramp.

Total Random
This will create a random colour ramp that usually has too many transitions. However you can easily position the sliders and fade over unwanted colours.

Border Colours
There are 3 border colours. Use the Get and Put buttons in the same way as the Get and Put buttons for the colour ramp controls. Click on Guess Colours and some border colours will be randomly chosen from the border of Winamp. You can keep clicking Guess Colours to keep guessing at different colours.

Tutorial 1 - Creating my Classic Profile

As a shorthand RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. An RGB value is a set of 3 numbers that represent the intensities for the red, green, and blue components of the colour.

  1. make sure Bars is the selected Set
  2. set the Left Slider to Colour number 255
  3. create a red colour (RGB value 255,0,0)
  4. click the left Get
  5. set the Right Slider to Colour number 147
  6. create a yellow colour (RGB value 255,255,0)
  7. click the right Get
  8. click Fade
  9. move the left slider to 0
  10. create a green colour (RGB value 0,255,0)
  11. click the left Get
  12. click Fade

That's not bad, but I wanted a little more depth in the lower end. The green is just too bright at the bottom.

  1. create a darker green (RGB value 0,172,0)
  2. click the left Get
  3. move the right slider to colour number 76
  4. click Fade

There's actually quite a noticeable difference if you take out step 14. I'm sure you'll agree that without step 14 the whole bottom of the colour ramp is just too dull.

I created the same colour ramp for the Peaks and set the Bar style to Classic, Peak Indicator style to Level, and Background style to Grid. Then set the horizontal and vertical spacing to 1 pixel so a grid is actually visible and use a bar width of 3.

Tutorial 2 - Creating my LCD Profile

A lot of people mailed me on this one asking how I did it. Maybe my ReadMe file is too long to actually read. I would have thought after reading it most people would know how this is done. Anyway, to get the exact colour for the background you will probably have to go into the colour picker since the RGB sliders aren't precise enough.

  1. set the Background style to Solid Colour
  2. go in to the colour factory and select the Flash colour Set
  3. move the right slider to colour 0
  4. create the LCD background colour (RGB 196,228,188)
  5. click the right Get
  6. select the Bars colour Set
  7. move the left slider to 255
  8. create black (RGB 0,0,0)
  9. click right Get
  10. click left Get
  11. click Fade
  12. select the Peaks colour Set
  13. click left Get
  14. click right Get
  15. click Fade

Set the vertical spacing to 0, horizontal spacing to 1, and bar width to 3. The Bar style and Peak Indicator style are irrelevant since the colour ramps are all black.

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