If you’re a creative person that does design work on a computer, chances are pretty good that you’re using Adobe® Photoshop or Adobe® Photoshop Elements at some point in your creative process.  Did you know that you can use Adobe Photoshop comfortably alongside BlackBerry® Theme Studio to streamline the process of creating BlackBerry® themes?

One of the first things you’ll want to do when creating a theme is set your default image editor in BlackBerry Theme Builder, which is the BlackBerry Theme Studio tool that assembles all the pieces into a shiny new BlackBerry theme. If you set a default image editor, you can use it to edit the individual icon and background graphics easily.

Setting your default image editor

• From your Windows Start menu, select BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 and then select Theme Builder.
• Once Theme Builder launches, select Edit -> Preferences
• From the Preferences dialog, click Applications.
• Under Select Default Image Editor, click Browse and locate the image editor you want to use in your Windows directory. Typically, this will be under Program Files, in a folder named after the company who makes the application. For example, on my computer, Adobe Photoshop is located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe.
• Click OK

Editing images

Once you have set your default image editor, you can use it to re-edit the images that you’ve imported into your theme, should you want to improve or change them.

For example, suppose I want to edit the image used as the background on my home screen. In Theme Builder’s inspector, I’ll click the Theme the Home Screen button. This brings up the features of the Home Screen that I can edit or change, including the Home Screen background.

Beside the various icons and backgrounds that can be imported, you’ll notice a dropdown arrow. If you click the arrow, a menu appears. To edit the image that you’ve imported, click Edit …

From here, your default image editor of choice (Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, uLead PhotoImpact … whatever you’ve set up) will launch with that image ready to be edited using the tools of that editor. Make your design changes and save your work in the image editor.

Then click the Dropdown again and click Reload. The updated image will be added to your theme.

Importing Photoshop Files

A new feature that we’ve added into BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 is the ability to import Adobe Photoshop .PSD files into BlackBerry Theme Builder. Any time you import an image into your theme, you now have the ability to import all the usual image suspects as well as Photoshop files as well.

If you have any questions you’d like answered about building BlackBerry themes, please post them below in the comments section!