In case you missed the news the other day, WindowBlinds 6.3 and SkinStudio 6.3 betas were released via Impulse and Stardock Central the other day. One of the most notable features was the layer blending feature, which opens up a bunch of creative possibilities for skinners. It allows you to create some high quality skins using layer blending, which saves some time and trouble. Layering in SkinStudio was a great feature, but it has now been enhanced by using features like Multiply, Screen, and Overlay modes.
Neil provided some images for me, and I wanted to post them to show you exactly what layer blending can do.
The first image here is an existing skin, with no layer blends at all.
These next two images are the same start menu. One has a layer blended on color pixels, and the other is blended on greyscale pixels. This was also done using the Multiply mode. All that was done was taking two tiling images and adding them in tiling mode as new layers.
For more information about WindowBlinds and SkinStudio, visit the websites below. If you don’t already have an Object Desktop or subscription, you can also get a special bundle with both WindowBlinds and SkinStudio included.