The Paisley theme is good for blogging because of it’s large typographical treatment of text, ample header space, and dark colors (which are especially good for displaying photos and artwork). But what happens when you get bored of the image? Or, what if you’re a guy and like the layout and post formatting, but you don’t want paisleys all over your blog? Here are the quick and easy steps for how to change the blog header image in the Paisley theme:
You’ll want to have Photoshop and be comfortable with manipulating images in it before starting this tutorial. When you’re ready, download this .psd source file for the header, which has four layers. Here’s the breakdown of the layers:
The top layer is a gradient fade into black for the edges of the header. Don’t change this unless you want your background color to be something other than black; in which case, use the fx option to apply a color overlay.
The next layer is titled “Top–Don’t change.” If you want to keep the zigzag effect, this layer is the most important layer. It needs to stay on top of everything else except the edges. On this layer, the Color Overlay effect controls the color of the space below the zigzag. Double click on this effect and change the color accordingly.
The last layer, titled “Your Image Here,” is where you’ll actually place your own image. It’s a good idea to create the image on a separate canvas and use the Place command (File >> Place) to import your image. Familiarize yourself with the functions of this layer: Alt + Click on the layer, and it will turn off all the other layers. You’ll see that the image actually spans the length of the canvas, but the zigzag patten layer interacts with it in such a way so as to hide the rest of the image. Alt + Click to turn the other layers back on. Go ahead and place your image, dragging it to the bottom of the layers palette and erasing/hiding the “Your Image Here” layer.
As long as you keep the layers in the order presented, you will have a file that can be manipulated time and time again to create new image headers for the Paisley theme.
To upload the file to your site, save your modifications, then save the file again as a .jpg with the name paisley_header. Make sure the file size is as small as it can be without affecting the image quality too much.
Using a FTP client such as Filezilla, upload the image to wp-content/themes/paisley/images. Just fyi: you will be replacing the header that’s there currently, since they both have the same name.
In the next week or so, I’ll start putting out some alternate images you can use for the Paisley header. Custom header themes are also available upon request.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?