I would rather you learned how to use Photoshop and any other programs required to create layouts than just convert other layouts, yes. That's where the term layout designer comes from, not layout hacker.
The issue I have is that to create those backgrounds you see takes me three days of solid work before they arrive at the stage you are picking them up. It's spade work, basically, spade work you're not doing. In fact, you're not really doing anything that requires any actual work, just loading a layout in and then doing what needs to be done via the editing tools built into the emu.
See, turning a shitty bunch of photos into a backdrop (or stitching scans or cleaning up a flyer) is not hard. It just takes time, lots and lots of it. Thus, I think you would be better learning to do that rather than just converting layouts and changing them.
A background of any DX (even a flyer one with no lines on) takes time to do. Do it, basically.
Nick (Guitar) and others (IE the people who helped create the components and even those who have given him ideas) have worked really, really hard on Amber. Converting MFME layouts into it wasn't exactly what he had in mind. In fact, it's a bit insulting really. All that hard work on an emulator to make it do things MFME does not do (large backdrops, near on full scaled artwork, lamp dimming, alpha channel blending) and all people seem to be doing with it is putting in the restrained layouts MFME allowed.
Stop. Just, stop. Take some source art, clean it up and make it as big as it allows, then make a layout in Amber.
My point will always hold firm. Layouts made in MFME work in MFME. There is absolutely no reason putting them in Amber. The only real reason I could see for doing that would be *IF* Wizard was capable of physically stopping people from using his emulator, or, publicly making it illegal for people to use his emulator. Then I could see a point to it.
But the fact is he can't do that, even as he would like to. So just leave the MFME stuff where it belongs (six to seven years in the past) and get working with what you have now. An emulator that allows the chains of a single sized set of pixels (IE your static desktop resolution) to be broken.
We don't need 1024 layouts now either. Learn to use the emu properly (not by loading in dumped crap from MFME) and you can make the source art as big as you wish.