So you want to create icons eh? In the bad old days, creating icons was quite a pain. Probably the best thing that's happened to PC icon creation is Windows XP. That's because Windows XP supports alpha channels in its icons.

Alpha channels allow for icons to anti-alias themselves. Or put another way, they don't look so blocky because the edges can blend in to your wallpaper or the folder background or whatever. This has been a boon to both professional and amateur icon authors.  Previously we talked about how to change your icons. But when it comes to creating your own icons the solutions have been problematic.

You can either pay quite a bit of money for an industrial strength program such as Microangelo. Microangelo is a very good program for icon artists who want to have a powerful graphics editor as part of the package. But such power comes at a cost (it's $39.95).  At the opposite extreme there are various freeware programs that, with enough effort, will let you crank out an icon.

But what about people who just want to sit down and take an existing image and create an icon with it? IconDeveloper can do that -- for free. And for users who want to do things like recolor existing images, make large icons, etc. IconDeveloper Pro ($19.95) can do that too.

Let me walk you through what IconDeveloper does so you can see what I mean.

IconDeveloper is basically designed for users who have .BMP, .JPG, and .PNG files that they've either downloaded elsewhere or created themselves with a program like Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever. Once they select one of those images, IconDeveloper will automatically take care of generating all the common icon sizes, scaling them very nicely (this is something that can't be understated - scaling of images always shows up as a bullet point but there is a world of difference in how well different programs scale images, IconDeveloper probably does it as well or better than pretty much anything out there). So in a few clicks you have an icon.

Let me give you a real world example:

I have a folder full of emails and other documents left over from Christmas. Letters, thank you letters, etc.  I wanted to create a folder that has this stuff in it and to make it stick out in "My Documents" I decided to give it its own icon. I wanted to do it as a Christmas tree.

So I went and found a Christmas tree .PNG file on Google and downloaded it and loaded it into IconDeveloper (drag and drop).

So there it is. I have a big old tree here. Then I selected it and chose make into an icon.

I now have my icon. That's it. It's an icon.

So here we my icon on my desktop. Looks pretty sweet eh? I am big into changing individual folders on my system because I have sooo much stuff.  These days with 100s of gigabytes of disk space, icons are a pretty useful way of being able to distinguish something important from the rest and that's why programs like IconDeveloper and IconPackager can be quite useful.

Sometimes I just want to change the color of an icon. You know, have some folder that's usually blue be red so that when I'm browsing through stuff it sticks out.  IconDeveloper does this extremely well.

Here I just picked a folder icon I liked in an icon library, went to color and told it to make the blues into oranges. And then saved it.

This can be taken one step further with batch processing.

Now I'm taking an icon package and changing all the icons at once. In this case, these are the Orion icons I bought. But there is no "Orion Gold". No problem, with IconDeveloper I just loaded up the emerald color and changed the emerald to gold. Look very closely at that screenshot. See how it only changed the emerald colors to gold without messing with the other colors!

This goes for those of us who are really into "Skinning" Windows. I will download a skin and often find it's not quite the right color. Sure, I could load it up in Photoshop and mess with it myself. But I'm a very lazy man. Dangerously lazy. Thankfully IconDeveloper makes it easy for someone of my low ability to change a skin in a few clicks.

Here is a Media Player skin I downloaded from WinCustomize.com. It's created by popular skin author Starone. But I don't like the color. Or I should say, it doesn't match the rest of my system. No problem, I'll just make it blue. Same process as before.

Net result of it. Okay, I didn't do a great job with my blue but you get the picture.

For me, the reason I wanted Stardock to make IconDeveloper is I just wanted a simple program that would let me take existing images and make them into icons. No fancy stuff, just turn these files into icons easily. I also wanted to be able to take icons and change their color all at once without a lot of effort (such as not having to worry about color changing changing everything. If I just want my blue folders to be olive that's what I want. I don't want everything olive, just the blue-ish parts).

You can download IconDeveloper at www.icondeveloper.com

It's also part of Object Desktop, a suite of desktop enhancement utilities.

Have fun!