In addition to the gradients in KDE's effects engine there are also several routines to do basic image manipulation. We will now go over how to tell KDE to use pixmaps for widgets and do some blending.
There is one key to tell KDE to use a pixmap for a widget, aptly called "Pixmap". If you want the pixmap to be tiled that is all you have to configure. Different scaling options are reviewed in the next section.
Lets use this pixmap for the PushButtons in our example.
Nice, but kind of boring. It would be cool to be able to automatically blend the pixmap based on the widget size. Well, you can using KDE :)
The keys related to blending are "BlendIntensity", "Gradient", and "GradientLow". The BlendIntensity key is a floating point number that if positive determines how much to fade the image and if negative determines how much of the image should remain the original pixmap and unaffected by the blend. The valid range is from -1 to 1.
The Gradient key is the same as in the previous section, and determines the type of blend to use. Valid values are Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal, Elliptic, Pyramid, and Rectangle.
The GradientLow key in this case determines the background color to fade to. The GradientHigh key is not used.
Here are a few examples of blending. They all use the same pixmap.
Here is a picture using a vertical blend:
And here is one using a vertical blend and a higher fade value (BlendIntensity=0.4):
Now it's time to look at the scaling options KDE offers.