First I'll assume you're on Window given the subforum we're in (you may be surprised to know that people don't always post in correct forum for their OS).
Locate the Kodi install folder in
Program Files or wherever you install to, in there finding
addons/skin.estuary/xml then find the file
Includes.xml
First thing do is to make a copy of the file (in case you mess anything up) for example
Includes_backup.xml
In this file you find the same xml code as found here
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...cludes.xml
The part you need to edit is
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master....xml#L1056
The way this line is constructed is that a background texture is loaded
special://skin/extras/backgrounds/primary.jpg then a colour tint is applied over the top which is the
colordiffuse="primary_background" bit.
It's not possible to remove the background texture without having to makes a lot of other changes, as simply removing the primary.jpg will make the backgound completely black in a lot of areas. So the bit I'd experiment with is
colordiffuse="primary_background" where
primary_background is defined in
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...lts.xml#L3 which gives a hex code
FF0E597E
These hex codes are in the form AA RR GG BB
A= alpha/transparency
R= red
G= green
B = blue
So my first edit would be to make that line
xml:
<texture colordiffuse="FF0E597E">special://skin/extras/backgrounds/primary.jpg</texture>
and confirm appearance is unchanged.
To understand the hex code you break into the Alpha and the colour (RGB) parts, so Alpha transparency is defined by
FF in this case which means 100% or solid. To convert percentage values to hex I use
https://www.joshuamiron.com/percent-to-hex-converter so for example if you only wanted 50% transparency then you'd use a hex of 80
To understand the colour part I use
https://htmlcolorcodes.com/
So plug the RRGGBB of 0E597E there and you get
So the first thing you could do is to remove the colour tint from the texture
xml:
<texture colordiffuse="FFFFFFFF">special://skin/extras/backgrounds/primary.jpg</texture>
then perhaps try altering the transparency of texture, for example 50% would be
xml:
<texture colordiffuse="80FFFFFF">special://skin/extras/backgrounds/primary.jpg</texture>
Then could perhaps experiment adding a different colour tint, perhaps a grey e.g. hex 808B96
xml:
<texture colordiffuse="80808B96">special://skin/extras/backgrounds/primary.jpg</texture>
When editing these these the program I'd recommend is Notepad++ also to make things easier I'd suggest making a keymap with the function
ReloadSkin()
Create a new
keyboard.xml file to be located is the
keymaps folder without your
Userdata folder, see
https://kodi.wiki/view/Keymap
xml:
<keymap>
<global>
<keyboard>
<f5>ReloadSkin()</f5>
<f8>Skin.ToggleDebug()</f8>
</keyboard>
</global>
</keymap>
Use whatever function keys you want,
Reload Skin() allows you to immediately see the effect of any changes, so do the edit and save then
ReloadSkin() which does what it says in reloading the skin and takes your changes. The other one I've got there is
Skin.ToggleDebug() which allows you to toggle a overlay which gives some debug details, for example if you've got a window open and you don't know what xml file is being used this will tell you.