On Thursday 21 February 2002 00:31, Ryan Cumming wrote:
> I meant drawing the image over the titlebar color internally, using the
> alpha channel to figure out how "transparent" various parts of the image is
> wrt to the titlebar color. The result of this could obviously be cached.
> This would be a much more flexible and intuitive approach for those wanting
> to replace the side image, than unconditional colourization.

If you try simulating this idea in the gimp by filling an empty image
with an imaginary titlebar color, and then adding the side image on
a new layer with say 50% opacity, you'll see that the effect is
quite different, and that it doesn't really work with the image
we have now.

I'm not an artist myself, but I think it would take a huge amount of
work with the alpha buffer to get the image to look just right after
it's been blended. While you're right in that it does add flexibility
to be able to create an image where some parts are recolored while
others are not, you're again stuck with the problem that this patch
is trying to solve in the first place - that not having parts
recolored means you're gonna end up with an image that might not
work with all color schemes.

I asked qwertz, who created the current side image, for his opinion,
and he says he thinks it would be overdoing something for a small
feature in KDE.

I prefer having a simple solution that we can use to improve color
scheme compatability for KDE 3.0, and then add more advanced stuff
later if the artists ask for it. I'm also not prepared to ask the KDE
artists to spend many more hours of their time creating yet another
side image when we have a solution that works just fine with an
image that they've already created.

Regards,
Fredrik