[Hook'emHorns]

I'm hoping some can help with this one. I've DL all the necessary programs to create my own themes and have created some rather nice ones, but I keep running into the same problem. When I go to export to a .alx file it keeps telling me that my homescreen image is too large. According to the error message, the image can not exceed 60Kb, but my image is just over 10Kb, so I'm not sure why I'm getting this error. I have tried saving the image as everything from a .bmp to .png

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[KonTiki]

If you have photoshop save as a web image and it will work.

[Hook'emHorns]

Is there a way to do it without a photoshop program? I had tried to just edit with MS Paint and then alter the format it is saved as. Is this where my problem lies?

[MegaBit]

Originally Posted by Hook'emHorns

Is there a way to do it without a photoshop program? I had tried to just edit with MS Paint and then alter the format it is saved as. Is this where my problem lies?

The Plazmic theme builder will blow-up the jpg file size that you have and that's the problem. It re-saves the file in PNG format. So, the best way is to save backgrounds in PNG (portable network graphics) format. PNG has several types and a good one for backgrounds is PNG8 with a color depth of 128. If the image is more block-tone, like a simple computer graphic, you may be able to use PNG8 with 256 color depth. In both cases, it needs to be less than the 60KB limit it's complaining about. More color depth equals larger file size.

You can also use GIF with similar color depths but GIF is not very good for continuous-tone images, such as photographs or nicely rendered computer graphics.

To make the nice translucent icons, you'll need to use PNG24 because it has true transparency and will not create white halos where clear pixels are supposed to be.

Several posters have identified free software packages that will allow you to perform the conversion. The gold standard is Photoshop, but it'll cost you about the price of two new 8700's.