Gradients for forums

[dazzled]

Am just wondering whats the best/easiest way to make gradients for your VB forum? I just want to make 2 simply gradients for my navbar and category titles to make everything look cleaner and add a bit more 'pop' as right now with just the flat hex colors it looks a little dull. I have photoshop cs3 but truth be told I am still learning how to work it. Any suggestions?

[Infopro]

Lots of "easy" ways to do this in PS, the easiest for you might be to recolor the originals that came with your forum though.

Open the gradient in PS, click Image in top toolbar, choose Mode > RGB color. Now open layers palete and copy the layer/image by dragging down to the create new layer icon. Untick it from showing then click on the copied image above it. Now click on Image again on top toolbar, then select Adjustments > Hue and Saturation and slide things around to get the color you want to use.

Or, just make a new image same size as the original gradient and fill it with the gradient tool.

That should get you going. ;)

[dazzled]

OK thank you that is very helpful!

Another silly question.. I want to test my gradients, I have them uploaded to the server. Now how exactly do I go about changing them. I see the hex colors in the style manager. How do I define that it is an image?

[Infopro]

On a standard default vb theme, the category strips use this:

#869BBF url(images/gradients/gradient_tcat.gif) repeat-x top left

The first is the color of course, the rest is the path to the image, and the stuff at the end tells your browser what to do with that image.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/pr_background-image.asp


So, if you wanted to test an image, name it the same as the original and upload to that directory, allow overwrite. Refresh forums page.

Easy huh? ;)


Good luck...