Preserved Topic: Icon addicts and pixel pushers, look here!

Is it just me or does the majority of great icon artists seem to be Mac users?

I've tried to find a program to cover all my icon making needs for windows. However there doesn't seem to be a program as natural to all icon makers as Photoshop is to webdesigners a.o.

After having tried a lot of different programs I still need to combine a few different programs to get the kind of features that I want. At the moment these are Icon Forge and Axialis IconWorkshop. There's also this icon plugin for Photoshop which is kind of neat but you can't trust it not to mess with your colors.

What kind of software do you use?

Just use illustrator/photoshop and export via iconbuilder (all on a PC).

As an interesting aside: this is how M$ do it.

___________________________
Money is the game other people play, that I try to avoid by having just enough not to play it.
-Norman Mailer
[Dufty][Cell 698]

good link Duft

Ah, IconBuilder was the plug-in I mentioned earlier. Okay, so I haven't used it very much but in the few times that I have it has used a mask (soft or hard) which screwed things up.

Also, to be honest Photoshop isn't very helpful when it comes to typical icon chores. Once you're past the conceptualization stage and have all your icon's pixels in place you need something a little more powerful than IconBuider to handle batch conversion, icon libraries and thing like that.

Thanks anyway for your reply.

Well they do say 'to each his own', but so far it's worked fine for me.
Good luck BlueHarvest, hope you find what you're looking for.

___________________________
Money is the game other people play, that I try to avoid by having just enough not to play it.
-Norman Mailer
[Dufty][Cell 698]

You know, I used that guide to XP icons when I designed XP inspired icons for an application a couple of months back. It's very useful.

To take full advantage of it one really should use a icon specialized program though. If you've onlt ever tried doing icons in Photoshop you really should try some other programs out. They have the equivalent of Photoshop plug-ins for making typical icon chores, something which normal graphics editors lack of course. Just a tip. :-)

quote:

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They have the equivalent of Photoshop plug-ins for making typical icon chores

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One thing I've learned during my incarceration here is that there's nothing quite like forgetting that you ever saw the Plug-In/Filter option in PS.

Instead, I've learned that just about anything a plug-in/filter can do, a bit of patience and a good tutorial can produce resuts which are exponentially better.

Take a look at these sites:



You will soon forget what the 'Filter' menu was ever there for

___________________________
Money is the game other people play, that I try to avoid by having just enough not to play it.
-Norman Mailer
[Dufty][Cell 698]


[This message has been edited by Dufty (edited 01-23-2003).]

Ooookay, now we're onto another topic all together. *L*

There was a time when I had every plugin for Photoshop there was... this was back in the day of Photoshop 3 & 4. Even then I rarely used more than one or two of the plugs for every day stuff. I created my own actions and used those instead. I still do to this day to escape repetative tasks.
Plugins are great at opening doors for beginners and getting their creative minds going. Sure, you'll get your lensflare abusers and look-at-me-I'm-using-every-filter-together-isn't-that-cool people. But so what? Let them have their fun I say.

Aaaaanyway, the features I talked about in icon making specific programs aren't there to create effects so much as to do some real work when it comes to processing the images, compiling libraries, making index colored icons with smart color convertion on transparent background, support for pressure sensitive brushes etc etc.

What I was hoping for in this topic was to get some tips on new software that might incorporate all of these features and in one program. I mean the folks over at Icon Factory are pros at this but IconBuilder really leaves a lot to be desired.



[This message has been edited by BlueHarvest (edited 01-23-2003).]

It takes MS 19 pages to describe how to make an icon for WinXP?

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What I was hoping for in this topic was to get some tips on new software that might incorporate all of these features and in one program.

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Well, it seems you already got the answer: > Photoshop <
After that, all you need is a prog to compile the finished images into an ico archive.

quote:

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making index colored icons with smart color convertion on transparent background, support for pressure sensitive brushes etc etc

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Photoshop allows you to achieve all these things, you just have to put in the work.
Seems that you're actually looking for a prog that allows you to bypass much of the 'work' phase and auto create a whole archive having created one base image.

I'm sure there are such prog out there, but not any that I'd ever consider.
It's like using auto-colour/contrast/hue to touch up your photos.
They work, but will never give the great results an artist should demand from his/her work.

I'll leave it at that BlueHarvest, maybe I've already said too much.

Once again though - good luck in your search.



___________________________
Money is the game other people play, that I try to avoid by having just enough not to play it.
-Norman Mailer
[Dufty][Cell 698]

Best programs I've ever used for icons: http://www.easyapps.com/

Icon Easel to make the icons, Easy Icons to build the libraries.

Good stuff.

Dufty: I think you misunderstand me. I'm not knocking down on Photoshop and I'm not looking for a program to do all my dirtywork for me. What I'm saying is that IconBuilder isn't the best solution I've seen so far.
I don't know what kind of experience you have with making icons. Let me just say that I was a little surprised to find that software from such icon pixel pushing gods as the Icon Factory people left so much to be desired.

DL-44: Oh dear! I haven't seen a homepage like that since 1995. *L* That aside it looks like it has most of the standard features. I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip!

Personally, I use Axialis and/or Photoshop. Axialis seems to do it all for me, as I usually just do the pixel by pixel thing. Anything complicated involves using photoshop and importing into Axialis.

BlueHarvest: Yep it is a tricky one and it would be a good project for anyone looking to make an Open Source application Or even a neat little online tool #cough#

The process I use is:

1. Make the icon on your image editting software of choice.

2. Copy and paste them into IconMaker:
www.simtel.net/pub/pd/5914.html

which allows you to create the different sizes quickly and easily.

3. Open it in AXIcons:
www.axialis.com/axicons/

and add the different colour depths.

Not ideal but it works (and yes once the GN redesign is done the favicon/icon creation tutorial will be the first one submitted).

[edit: And I forgot to mention that there is an FAQ:

:FAQ:

although it could do with a bit of expansion]

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Silence: I do that too. I like the way Axialis handles bundled icons. Usually I have to make icons with several different sizes and color depth embedded in them. Axialis handles that process very well.

Emperor: I hear you. That's pretty much how I work today. Jump from one program to the other.
Think I actualy tried IkonMaker once. I probably came to the conclusion that Axialis or IconForge did it just as well or better so I gave it up. *shrug*

BlueHarvest:

quote:

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Think I actualy tried IkonMaker once. I probably came to the conclusion that Axialis or IconForge did it just as well or better so I gave it up.

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Pretty much - I just found IkonMaker to be quick, simple and free (and better than some pay for applications for what I was looking for - the ability to drop 2 different sized images into the .ico) but as a one-stop package? Nope.

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

*nods* Sounds like I have to reinstall it and look it over again.
My company's going though it's software licenses at the moment and if I could get rid of at least one icon related program it would look good on my report, you know? ;-)

Point taken BlueHarvest.

I always figured it's just as easy to start & finish in PS.
Spend some time making all the variations just-so, then dump into an ico building package.

Then again, I never got around to learning most keyboard shortcuts either!




___________________________
Money is the game other people play, that I try to avoid by having just enough not to play it.
-Norman Mailer
[Dufty][Cell 698]

damn... and here on the windows box I just save as BMP and rename to .ICO and it works fine...


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
ICQ: 67751342

PS: Ahhhh but that doesn't take advantage of the .ico format. Its like an envelope into which you can place graphics with different sizes and different colour depths so that the computer can pick the appropriate one for the context.

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Yup...very common misconception regarding .ico's...it's not just a graphic with the proper extension, it's a collection of graphics.

Wow. I've never looked into making Icon's and stuff before. This is all very interesting. I've also wondered how XP's icons were made and I never would have guessed a vector illustration app for icon making, that's for damn sure.

Dufty: Aw but the shortcuts are such time savers! How much do you LOVE crtl + alt + z for multiple undo's in PS7 btw? One hand on the keyboard and the other on your Wacom pen. Bliss! :P

Emperor & DL-44: Right you are. Personally I hardly ever make an icon that contains just one image. It's almost always a set of images and a lot of the time they're not even bundled in the ico format, they're embedded in dll's.

PS. What kind of software, if any, do you use to convert multiple icons to a different image format. (Jpg, gif, tif, pct etc)

I've tried several different ones and most of them handle it very badly. So far the best I've tried is a program called AutoImager. It's simple to use and it converts a whole bunch of icons in one step.

Only one problem... I was converting a collection of icons to gifs with transparency for a web interface. Worked like a charm on single icons but it took ico files with more than one image in them and made them into animated gifs! *LOL* Made me think of the movie The Fly. It was like it couldn't figure out what to do with it so it merged it together. Oh well...



[This message has been edited by BlueHarvest (edited 01-24-2003).]

i use gif movie gear to make icons. it's easy to use, though i haven't made many icons. when i do make them though, i use ps to make them and resize them...then export to gmg.
www.moviegear.com