i just recently started trying ( and failing ) to make skins .. i got a program called style skin to make life easier .. i have smoe now useless bitmaps .. and dont know where to go from there ... who to add em to win amp .. what if anything i need to add .. and if i need to convert the file types and how to do it ... or if im using essentially a totally useless program ... alot of questions i know .. but i need all the help i can get
any info i can get will be grestly appreciated

All-Round Skinners
The Cyanide Shop v1.0
Easy Skin Generator
QuickSkin v1.2
Winamp Skin Maker v1.05
W Skinner v2.0

Viscolor Editors
4Q VisEditor v1.02
Viscolor Utility v1.21

Transparency Editors
TransTrace v1.12
SweepTrans v1.1.1

Button Extractors
EZ Buttons v2.172
Winamp Skin Wizard v1.1




But a skin tool is not the only software to use. They are usually bretty basic and if you submit a skin here that has been created with a skinmaker, then chances are taht it won't get a very high rating. You should need to create some of your own graphics at some point in the process. And for this you need a graphics application.

There are two main choices.

Paint Shop Pro - from Jasc: http://www.jasc.com

Paint Shop Pro is an excellent graphics editor (my own personal favourite). It is easy to learn by exploring. And can do most of the stuff that Adobe Photoshop can do, but not quite all. It's not as powerful. BUT it is reasonably priced! Version 7.0 is in beta (you can get it to test) Version 6.0 has a 30 day trial.

This gives you a cheap, good, usable option.

Photoshop - from Adobe: http://www.adobe.com

Adobe Photoshop <quote from THEMike> from adobe is pretty much the standard application for proffesional graphics designers, and the favoured tool of many of the real top-notch skin makers Adobe is VERY powerful indeed. It's hertiage is adjustment of scanned photographs. It's a lot harder to get into using. You need either a good book, or a good website dedicated to teaching Adobe to get the most out of it, and it has a HEFTY price tag. But it's worth it if you're making a lot of pictures.</unquote>


Open up the base skin usin g Winzip. It contains a list of images. Change them with your skinning program to whatever you want. Save them and re-zip the files. Copy the zip file into your c:\Program files\Winamp\Skins directory. Open up Winamp, and select your skin to see how it looks.

Thats just a rough outline of what to do. If you want a good tutorial, then go to http://members.nbci.com/WSDskins/ It can explain infinitely more to you than I can explain here.