Colouring all elements has never been easier. Simply add this effect to any WPF Element to change all of the elements children to a new set of shades of your chosen colour. Each colour setting fully respects all luminance levels of your current colour, and changes the actual colour to whatever you've chosen.

Unlike other version of this colorizing effect you also set full elements, including forground or background colors to be ignored by the Colorize effect, giving you complete control over what elements are affected! For example, by setting the foreground colour to be ignored means you can change the colours of your interface elements without affecting their text.

 

 

The desaturation effect allows you to remove all colour from any UIElement it is applied to. Removing colour has advantages over merely swapping an elements colour for a Colours.Gray. If your element contains any bitmaps, an example would be a Button with a bitmap or toolbar glyph, then merely swapping an elements colour with Gray won't affect the bitmap. You'll end up with a gray button and a colourful bitmap. This doesn't really give the impression of a disabled element. Applying the DesaturationEffect allows you to remove the colour from both the button and its associated bitmap to give the impression of a disabled button. The Desaturation property is fully animatable, so you can fade down to gray to show disabled items. A sample with the library shows how to apply this effect at the window level so the application window fades to gray when its no longer active.

 

 

The shade effect is probably the most usefull of the WPF Effects. The ShadeEffect maintains the relationship between your interfaces colours, but allows a complete recolouring by simply changing the effects Shade Property. This effect almost completely removes the need to manage application skinning by swapping resource dictionaries of colours, rather, wrapping the elements that require skinning with this effect allows an almost infinte set of new skins to be created by simply setting a single floating point property!

Since the relationships between the colours is maintained, whatever your colour scheme, the new scheme will maintain that relationship,

Here's a more realistic skinning example using the freely available WPF Outlook Hands-On-Lab from Microsoft.

Here you can see that the effect maintains the original pastel shades, and simply changes the base hues. So if your original colour scheme was based on split complements, triadic hues or simple duotones, that relationship will be maintained.