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Windows Shutdown Look
I’ve been trying to duplicate the look Windows XP gives the desktop when shutting down. When you click shutdown, windows desaturates the whole screen, but it seems to be more complicated than just a quick Shift+Ctrl+U. It doesn’t desaturate completely, and what’s more there seems to be a darkening of specific color ranges, especially in the reds.
If you want to see what I mean, open up a colorful image with some nice contrast, then initiate the Windows shutdown dialogue and wait a few seconds.
I’m trying to get there in as few steps as possible. I’ve had some luck fiddling around with Image>Adjustments>Black & White, but can’t quite duplicate the effect, and I can’t help feeling like there’s an even simpler way to do it. I guess a better question would be “how is Windows doing it?”.
…Curves, or Levels, maybe?
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3 Replies
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Try using the Vibrance setting and lowering the value. That may be close?
Or, put a B/W image on top of the color and then change its opacity.
Pauley
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I’m thinking “vibrance” is a CS4 setting, I’m on CS3. Just a black and white overlay doesn’t do it because individual channels are being brightened and darkened at different levels. I’ve got a pretty close approximation with the Black & White settings and another layer overlaying color, with opacity of the color layer set to 8-10%.
I just can’t imagine Windows doing something quite so complicated. Anybody know how Microsoft is doing it?
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Yep, vibrance is in CS4. Sorry.
I know the effect you are talking about. I’ll have to get to an XP machine to see if anything obvious comes out. I agree; I can’t imagine the programmer doing anything too complex for that effect.
You could ‘reverse engineer’ it. Make a color gradient in PS and have it viewable on screen. Do the XP ‘shutdown’ and then hit ‘print screen’. Cancel the shutdown and paste the image (which should be a copy of the screen that was displayed when you hit print screen). You can then use the eyedropper tool to see the delta between the original and the new color.
Pauley
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