I've been working on this for a while. It is a "skin" for the music software I use. The image shows just a small selection of the work, there are more than twice that number of instruments and many more effects, as well as a mixer, all of which had to be done. Its a massive amount of work and if it wasn't fro Xara, I don't think I could get through it. The knobs are multi-frame animations done is a specialist application, KnobMan, but the rest is Xara. Because I used to get complaints about blurry images, I export everything at 300 dpi and then down-res it in Photoshop to 96 dpi. That seems to keep the bevels and text nice and crisp. For this skin, I also used Photoshop's Lighting Effects (in the Render group) on each background image. It is faded back - 24% transparency using Hard Light blending mode - so it is quite subtle but it makes a big difference to the overall look.

It started out looking nice and clean, like the second image, then I downloaded a few "old metal" textures and applied them liberally to age everything, using different transparency modes to achieve the desired effect. The clean version is called XTRO and I've called the grungy version XTROapocalypse. I've made half-a-dozen or more skins for this application, Synapse Audio's Orion, but this is easily the most complete and best designed of the lot. Previously I have concentrated more on usability than style but this one combines both to really good effect, I hope.

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