When searching for a tool to create or modify icons, what type of tools will you consider? A complete graphical editing suite loaded with features, filling the entire DVD and costing more than half a grand? Or a fast, compact free tool, downloads in seconds and is optimized for pixel-peeping?
If you're like most designers, you'll go for the second option. And you'll make the perfect choice. While it's totally possible to use Adobe Photoshop and alike to make icons, these tools were never made for the job. Small graphics imposes its own requirements, and the choice of a proper tool is important for getting perfect end result.
Junior Icon Editor at http://www.free-icon-editor.com/ is a free icon editor developed by Aha-Soft, a design company well-known for its many collections of stock graphics. This is the tool they use in-house to make the smallest sizes like 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, where each pixel matters.
The free icon editor comes with everything you want to design, paint and modify raster icons. Supporting color depths of up to 8 bits per color channel (that's 24 bits in total), Junior Icon Editor offers full support for the extra 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, boosting the total maximum color depth of the image to 32 bits. Alpha channel is a separate layer defining a semi-transparent mask for the icon. Depending on that mask, some parts of your image can be opaque, transparent, or semi-transparent. This innovative feature brings two important benefits to icons employing the Alpha channel. First, there will be no more jagged edges: your icons will always look smooth all around. Second, your icons will fit smoothly on complex backgrounds including bright colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are used in many systems such as Windows Phone, Vista, Windows 7, Android, Blackberry and Apple iOS devices.
If you need support for terminal apps, Symbian OS or very old systems, you can make legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Talking of compatibility, the free icon editor can import and save icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR formats. You can use icons in these formats on every desktop and mobile system existing.
The free icon editor provides numerous of handy tools to create and modify icons at pixel level. You can design icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a number of geometric shapes such as ellipses, rectangles, lines and curves. You can change individual pixels with a sharpie. Existing icons can be rolled, rotated, shifted or reflected. For 256-color images, you can pick or edit available palette. True Color icons can use the entire spectrum.
Junior Icon Editor is light and fast. Best of all, it's absolutely free. Download your copy of this free icon editor at http://www.sibcode.com/
Julie Goodwin is a web designer who regularly uses SibCode free stock editor to modify stock icons to save time and money while guaranteeing high quality, professional results.
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