Curtains: How to Create Your Own Styles
Start from scratch or edit an existing one!
Thursday, January 21, 2021 by Tatiora | Discussion: Stardock Blog
One of Object Desktop’s greatest additions last year, Curtains lets you add new “modes” to Windows 10. With Curtains, you can customize the Start button, title bar buttons, and title bar, plus adjust hundreds of other small elements in Windows. You can be as specific and detailed as you want to be, or you can make broader, more subtle changes, whichever suits your preference best!
One of the things you can do with Curtains is create and share your own styles. I’m definitely not a style expert - I don’t really have much of an eye for design - but I wanted to walk through some of the options and possibilities that exist for people who are much more talented than myself.
For those of you who, like me, don’t see themselves as much of a design guru, the options that exist for editing existing styles are pretty great too, so don’t fret! On that note, let’s take a dive into Curtains customization and what we can do with it.
If you like being very specific with customization options, then you’ll love just how much tweaking is available to you in Curtains. I started exploring by opening up Curtains and selecting “Create New.” I then named my style, added a brief description and my username, and got started with it.
I discovered that I could pick an image to start with if I wanted to, and that Curtains would create frames from a background that I selected, adjusting the color scheme to pull colors from that image.
I could go even further beyond that and edit the image layer, too. I can add effects, being as wild or a subtle as I like (below is an example of the balloon effect). The effects also have sounds, so I can set the volume on that if I’m inclined not to mute it.
One of my favorite details in the editor - which you can do whether you’re adjusting an existing style or creating one from scratch - are Shadows. You can change the color of the shadow on your window, adjust the transparency and blur level, and even adjust how much shadow the window casts.
What I tend to prefer to do is pick a style that already exists and edit it to suit my tastes. A feature I almost always make sure to have turned on no matter what style I use is the background blur. To change this, I go into “advanced properties” on the style (I always make a copy, I never edit the original) and scroll down toward the bottom until I find “Explorer background blur mode.” I personally like the Acrylic Blur.
Below, you can see an example of an edited version of Dark Waters. I adjusted the colors (normally, I would definitely not be using pink, but I wanted to go for a dramatic effect here just so you can see), changed the shadows so that they would tint lavender, and applied it to my desktop.
Honestly, I genuinely like the base styles that come already included with Curtains. I’m usually perfectly content with just altering the colors to match the background I’ve chosen for my desktop and making sure I have the blur effect turned on.
Curtains, combined with DeskScapes, Fences, and Groupy have made my home PC very unique to me. I generally love blue and aqua tones, so it’s exciting for me to be able to apply that in lots of different places on my computer where I generally would be unable to otherwise.
Are you a fan of editing and creating styles in Curtains? If so, please share your tips with me!
Reply #2 Friday, December 31, 2021 6:51 PM
The section you have for adding effects (the balloons with sound) doesn't work, at least doesn't seem like it will. The image editor is Windows Photo which exports those types of images as .mp4 video files. Curtains only allows me to choose PNG images to be applied to titlebars.
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Reply #1 Thursday, January 21, 2021 6:39 PM
Can we make this a sticky? Make it easily available.