New to Skins and looking for help

from WinCustomize Forums
I'm highly new to making skins and was wondering if anyone could recommend some good ways to get started in creating various skins. At the moment I'm highly interested in creating some really nice Winamp skins. I've created a few with a program called skinner however it is extremely basic and limiting. Can someone please point me in the direction of either some higher end programs or on how I can go about learning to create tehm on my own. Thanks!
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Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Knid...you passed the first test...realizing that 'Skinner' and/or 'Skinmaker' are really poor ways to create WinAMP skins.
The best method is to grab hold of an existing skin...a fairly clean, un-cluttered one, and just alter each graphic part.....bit by bit, using your favourite drawing proggy...PaintShop Pro or Photoshop or Gimp...whatever...and observe the results of your 'fiddling'. Eventually, you will come to understand exactly what each part of the various bmps actually does/relates to.

Then, creating your own skins will be easy. The first one will always require trial-and-error, but later ones will become quite straight-forward...
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Mwah, what Jafo says leads to ripping. You can try that route, but remember that you're modifying an exiting work then, so you can't upload that.

The best way is to take an existing skin and take it apart to see what it is made up off. Usually a load of bitmaps and a textfile to hold things together. Always read the documentation on it.

Basically all you need is an image editor, a text editor and your skinnable app to test it on.
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