Sorry for my long term disappearance from the PSC scene. My job has taken a turn for the busier and I no longer have the time to chop for fun, only for profit.

Can anyone out there recommend an Icon program? I need to make Icons (.ico extension) for my webmaster at work, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do it using any Adobe products.

Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

- Hanzeeg
( ps- I don't care what the Pope says about her, I still love Nancers! )

save the icon as a .bmp then rename it to .ico
or download microangelo http://www.microangelo.us/

you can't create an icon ... you have to become an icon ... it's not for everybody

you can download a plugin for photoshop...

...beeeee the icon!

Take the icon from my hand, grasshopper.

microangelo ios the easiest one i've seen in a while... i think that there is a stardock icon maker too

I used to use @icon sushi. You do not want to save it as a BMP, because BMPs don't support alpha transparency(high color icons in XP do), and Windows is inconsistent in its icon rendering code such that some programs will show them as transparent, and some will show them with a colored background.

hmmmm. Interesting.

I tried the PS plugin. It allowed me to save as an ICO if I converted the file to Index color from RGB. I still have trouble opening other icons. Even changing their extension didn't help. I don't have much patientce for drawing icons pixel by pixel like Microangelo. I tried that a couple years ago as a free trial. I never really got it to work the way I wanted it to.

I just want to use a company logo in an Icon so that when someone creates a shortcut, the icon goes with it.

Knowhadimean?

I'll keep trying.

ICO files store multiple images, so the PS plugin probably makes very basic icons. You want to have 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 48x48, and maybe 64x64 for Windows icons, and have 256 color, 24 bit, and 32 bit versions. You might skip 32 bit on the lower resolutions. The easiest way to do it is make the icon a large size in the GIMP(Photoshop or whatever) and then save it as a PNG and import it into @icon sushi or any other PNG supporting icon program. You will want to save one version with and one version without alpha transparency. There is a slight quality gain if you scale the image in the GIMP(or Photoshop). Using vector images will produce crisp looking icons, but may require more work.

Open some existing icons and extract the different sizes and color depths to see how the ICO files work.

I could maybe make a tutorial showing how to make icons on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows using only free tools if there is enough demand for such a thing. You would be able to follow with Photoshop since I assume you know how to save files in different formats and scale them.

you don't need to draw pixel by pixel, you can import images into microangelo, and it will make them into an icon