Here I explain my way of customizing instruments panels. I will just focus the way of precision positioning the instruments over the background art so that each one align by the pixel.

If you ever tried to fine place the instruments using that reduced image shown in Plane-Maker -» instruments window you will know how it is a pain. One feature that I have to applaud in that tool is the possibility of shift each instrument numerically by [x,y] coordinate. And this is where we start from.

How-to steps:

1. Create your customized panel art and place the instruments using Plane-Maker in the usual fashion (but do not bother with been painfully precise in positioning them at this moment);
   
   
2. Move or rename your customized panel bitmap file, out-off the "bitmaps interior" folder of your plane's folder, so that when you open the plane in X-Plane it will not use your panel yet;
   
   
3. Create a "blank" bitmap with the same resolution of the panel bitmap. I suggest doing it entirely painted in the "transparent" X-Plane color (pure magenta), that is RGB [R=255, G=0, B=255] or a good contrasting color (in the following example I used blue);
   
   
4. Save it in the "bitmaps interior" folder of your plane's folder using the correct name of your plane ACF, so that when you open the plane in X-Plane it will use this bitmap as your plane's panel;
   
   
5. Activate your preferred screen capture software (I love the feature available in Paint Shop Pro) and open X-Plane, choosing this plane that you are modeling the panel for (at this moment it will be essential that your plane model has all essential data correctly set, to avoid X-Plane rejecting to open it, that is, engines values, existing airfoils, etc);
   
   
6. When the panel view shows you will see only the readout values of all instruments drawn over a plain background. Then take a nice shot of it with your screen capture software. I use to take more than one shot after changing some switches, throttles and other movable controls off their starting positions, so that it provides me with more reference views;
   
   
7. Back to your graphic editing software (now you will need one that can work with image layers), I suggest that you open your customized panel image and add as another layer(s) the image(s) captured in the last step. Look this abstraction to understand the procedure;
   

8. Using Paint Shop as an example I can either select all the blue color of the layer containing the readouts captured (let's call it layer#2) with the "Magic Wand" feature and then delete these areas or I can play with the transparency level of layer#2. Both these ways have the intention of letting see through layer#2 the background of the customized panel so that I can see how much the instruments and their readouts are disaligned;
   
   
9. To illustrate it the following composed image shows, most to the left, the layer#2 while still with the blue color acting as a background; at the middle, the same layer#2 after removing its blue color leaving only the instruments readouts and at the most right, the layer#1 containing your plane's panel background art.
   

The procedure here is:

a) Using the Magic Hand tool shown inside the (A) lasso you can select just the blue background of layer#2 and then delete it so that you will get the result shown in the middle area of this image.

b) After removing the blue color you can select any individual instrument readout (using the select tool of the graphic software) and then discover how much X and Y pixels it is necessary to move the readout so that it goes aligned with the background art.

c) Taking the example shown inside the (B) lasso you can see that it need to be moved some pixels to the left and some down. Now we will need to ALT-TAB a lot between the graphic software and Plane-Maker while this one is kept in the instrument panel editing window.

d) In Paint Shop Pro you can use the numerical keypad arrows to move a selection pixel by pixel, so you pump 5 times the left key and 6 times the down key to put that artificial horizon (AH) of this example on its correct position. Great. Now ALT-TAB to Plane-Maker, select the AH and using its numerical properties, do the same move, that is for this example, reducing X coordinate in 5 units and Y coordinate in 6 units.

e) ALT-TAB back to graphic editor software and proceed to the next instrument readout repeating the last step until all instruments be in perfect alignment.

Almost everything here done by me: Marcelo M. Marques - codename 31 M.M.M
mmarques@frontier.com.br