This page answers the following questions:

There are many good icon editors, but usually you alreay have an image editor or a painting program that you're familiar with. If you don't have one, there are plenty of good ones out there. So why use an icon editor when you can use your favourite image editor or painting program to design the images and then use an icon converter to convert them into icon files.

Frontbase Image to Icon for Windows

Convert images in Windows Explorer.

Here's a screenshot of the converter: Frontbase Image to Icon supports the following image formats: Bitmap (.bmp) JPEG (.jpg) Zsoft Paintbrush (.pcx) Portable Network Graphics (.png) Truevision Targa (.tga) Sun Raster Image (.ras) Windows Icon (.ico) Read the Frontbase Image to Icon Manual

There are many image formats, e.g. JPG, BMP, PNG and PCX. The icon format is also an image format. Its file extension is .ico. The icon files can contain more than one image. This is why it's so usefull in some situations. There are different icon formats because operating systems use their own formats. We explain the Windows icon format below.

When a user browses his files in Windows it may, depending on the viewing settings, look like this :

When Windows shows the file list it checks the viewing settings and then determines which images to extract from the files' icons. When, for instance, a user looks at a file list with small icons, Windows extracts the images with the dimension 16x16 pixels from the icons. Also if Windows can show only 256 colors (8 bpp) it searches for images with 256 colors. However, if Windows can't find the appropriate image it chooses the closest one that fits the description.

An example: An icon file contains the following images: Name Dimension Color Depth (Bits per pixel) image 1 32x32 8 bpp image 2 48x48 32 bpp The user looks at a file list in Windows which shows small (16x16) icon images and the computer can show only 256 colors (8 bpp). When Windows checks the icon files and can't find any appropriate image for the above icon file, it has to choose one, so it chooses image 1 because its dimension is closer to 16x16 pixels than to the dimension of image 2 and because it has the color depth of 8 bpp.

When you make an icon file you should include at least the following dimensions and color depths:

• 16x16 4 bpp
• 32x32 4 bpp
• 48x48 4 bpp
• 16x16 8 bpp
• 32x32 8 bpp
• 48x48 8 bpp
• 16x16 32 bpp
• 32x32 32 bpp
• 48x48 32 bpp

An image in an icon file can have transparent pixels if its color depth is below 32 bpp. If the color depth is 32 bpp all the pixels can have different levels of transparency, called the alpha value. The alpha value can vary from 0 to 255. The lower the alpha value is the more transparent is the pixel. If the alpha value is 0, the pixel is invisible. You can do some nice effect with the alpha value. Windows XP supports images with a color depth of 32 bpp.