Try the freeworlds 1.66 mod, it comes with 1 main color and 4 stand alone HUD color mods, the 4 stand alones can be used with other mods, ask them nicely though and give them credit if you use any of them, the colors are Jade, Rubin, Chrome & Aluminium.

Doing it yourself is pretty straight forward as all your doing is swapping textures, but you have to do it to almost two thirds of the 3db & cmp files in the interface folder.

Most of the textures are solid RGB color TGA (a couple are index color), the part that will catch most people is that the RGB's have an Alpha channel with a transparancy fill gradiant that creates the FL HUD we all know, no Alpha and you get a 32x32 pixel solid block on screen that obscures most of the icons.

**shuffles off with a new headache**

hmm, can you post the chrome color HUD stand alone?

@ Bejaymac,
What is that program which handles the 32bit .dds textures with transparencies?
(Something about the last 8 bits having to do with transparency...that's the alpha channel? )

photoshop

Yes, photoshop with the DDS plugin.

Requiem: A Total FL Conversion Mod .

@ commodore001, you have to d/l the Freeworlds 1.66 mod to get them as they're part of the mod (it's a beast at 225 Mb), after it's installed into FLMM 1.31 (don't use FLMM 1.4 as it's F***ed) you'll see the 4 HUD's are listed in the mods window.

Rankor, the Gimp (only in TGA) or paintshop pro do Alpha's, but like OP I prefer Photoshop (CS2 in my case) as it's much easier to work in.

**shuffles off with a new headache**