Hello,

You need to turn on the transparency for each style. Here what it look like if your turn it on.

Here is how you turn and adjust it. Curtains config -> Edit style -> Windows tab-> Advance Property -> scroll down to Explorer background blur mode -> Drop down menu ->Choose blur type and change those within that section colors and transparency level active and inactive mode and also there are different sections between Dark and light mode. Click "apply changes" button to see the changes.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

basj

reply 21

Hello,

You need to turn on the transparency for each style. Here what it look like if your turn it on.

Reduced 90%

Original 929 x 657

Here is how you turn and adjust it. Curtains config -> Edit style -> Windows tab-> Advance Property -> scroll down to Explorer background blur mode -> Drop down menu ->Choose blur type and change those within that section colors and transparency level active and inactive mode and also there are different sections between Dark and light mode. Click "apply changes" button to see the changes.

Reduced 57%

Original 1454 x 963

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Than Worked !

Thanks .. 😊

Great, glad it work.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Guys,

I have been trying to figure out which software to use for skinning Windows 10 with a Windows XP or Windows 7 theme, including round corners and including scrollbars, for a long time without real success. 

Can somebody point me in the right direction, particularly whether I should use WindowBlinds or Curtains, or something else?

Me too.

You would want to use WindowBlinds (plus Start10) which skins more thoroughly than Curtains.  For example, Curtains does not skin scrollbars.  Even at that though, an XP style skin on Win10 is not going to look exactly like XP, some things simply won't skin the same.

Here are a couple of XP style skins for Win10 I found just now;

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/9262/

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/9119/

Thank you Dave, that looks great!

I have installed WindowBlinds now and tried one of the themes that come with it. 

Works good, however, it seems that the skinning is not HiDPI aware?

Everything looks blurry on my 4K monitors with Windows scaling set to 200%:

Is that normal, I mean, are the skin elements of WindowBlinds (like buttons, round corners etc.) not available with HiDPI resolution?

I don't know the answer to that, and you will probably have better luck if you start a new thread perhaps here:

https://forums.wincustomize.com/forum/167

Thanks -- I believe that is one of the two that also Dave has linked.

I shall try one of these, or even the beautiful Vista Plus, as soon as I find out whether my HiDPI/Retina monitor setup is supported.

Edit:
Unfortunately, WindowBlinds damaged interfered with my patched theme (i.e. did not restore it completely on reset). Not even restoring the system to a point in time before installing WindowBlinds helped with this.

Luckily, I was able to restore the theme by re-patching it with the excellent UltraUXThemePatcher, like so:

You can NOT have UltraUXThemePatcher insatalled and expect Windowblinds to behave without errors. I have tried that several times without good results. UXT alter your system files, which is the best reason for not using it - Windowblinds don't. So your conclusion that Windowblinds damaged your theme, is wrong, imo.

Yes, technically speaking that is probably correct. 

Still, I find it somewhat strange (by Windows, that is) that not even System Restore fixed this.

Anyway, I got my theme back

Unfortunately, that probably will not be the case for most currently available themes, since these are entirely bitmap-based as I have seen now, and normally only contain one size of all elements, which is calculated for 100% scaling in Windows.

Buttons, window borders and other things therefore will always look pixelated and/or blurry on Retina screens, like the below extracts from eXperience_Release.wba (enlarged):

Just to correct something here.

WindowBlinds does not touch any patched files or themes or replace any system files.  Given rolling back to a date before installing WB also didn't work rather suggests an OS patch replaced one of the files you had patched with an unpatched one.

With regards to high dpi, WB will automatically scale graphics based on dpi to ensure they remain the right size regardless of the users actual dpi settings and generally they should look pretty good as every pixel will be smaller.  Blown up they look blurry but assuming the dpi is set to physical dpi rather than being used to simply make things bigger you would have to look closely to even notice especially as text is sharp.  WB 10.5 and higher allow a skin to include multiple versions of images to cater for other dpis, but this is rarely done by skin authors currently.

Stardock Curtains also supports high dpi and usually scales down from a super high res version of a image making life easier for the author who only has to include the one image.

In this case, Curtains seems to be the way to go for me, as soon as some great XP or 7 or Vista themes become available for it.

Or I just leave it with my above, patched theme which also is not too bad. 

When you install Curtains, this theme comes with it.

I am trying to make a Curtains theme to satisfy my Windows 7 Aero Glass style needs, and I'm using modified Windows 8 RP assets to try do it. I feel like it's a good update to the classic Aero design (and using Windows 7 Aero assets don't work well in Curtains). This is never going to be perfect but here's how I currently have it looking. I'm not happy with it yet, blur in the title bars would help it feel right.

Good morning. My drop shadow feature isn't working in curtains. Need help. I have tried all kinds of transparency and blur shadow combination with a 2-4 mm of thickness. Nothing seems to have any effect. 

Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. But, not really sure on this one. Do you mean, you can't get drop shadows to work within Curtains or ShadowFX? Please elaborate.

Thanks
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.