1. IcoFX 1.6
URL: http://icofx.ro/.
Features: Support for Vista icon with PNG compression; Create icons for Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista; Support for Mac OS X icons; Convert Macintosh icons to Windows icons; Create icon libraries; Create favicon for websites or blogs; Easily convert images to icons; Add, change or delete icons inside exe files; Support for transparency (alpha channel); Batch processing for import, export and extract; Multiple language support; More than 40 effects + custom filter; Resolutions up to 256×256; Data types: 2, 16, 256, True Color, True Color + Alpha; Extract icons from 32 bit exe and dll; Import and export images; Transparent, Brighten/Darken, Blur/Sharpen tools.
View: This is by far the the best Free Icon Editor, with its feature list seemingly endless and the quality of the end product pheneomenal. Recommended.
2. Iconmaker
URL: http://free-icon-editor.com/.
Features: Create and edit icons in either standard or custom sizes, in color depths up to 16 million colors. Standard icon sizes are 16×16, 32×32, 48×48; Make icons with transparency; Make icons for Windows XP in 32-bit color depth with 8-bit alpha channel; Paint images with pen, brush, airbrush, ellipse, rectangle, line, curve tools; Roll, shift and rotate images; Import and export .ico, .png, .xpm, .xbm, and .icpr formats; Sort images inside icons; Copy and paste images to other applications; Test icons.
View: Strictly speaking this isn’t free, but you do have a 30 day free trial. Overall this is an excellent editor, not as good as IcoFX, but very powerful and professional all the same.
3. IconDeveloper
URL: http://www.stardock.com.
Features: Create & Edit Small Sized Icons (16×16); Create & Edit Standard Sized Icons (32×32); Scale Icons to different formats; Convert PNGs to icons; Create & Edit Windows XP formatted icons; Right click on images from Explorer and convert to icons; Convert images from clipboard (copy & paste) into icons; Create & Edit Very Large Sized Icons (48×48); Create & Edit any sized icons (any resolution, up to 256×256!).
View: There is also a premium version from Stardock which offers a few more features, the free version offers enough to make it a very good good editor. The interface looks amazing, making it the easiest editor to use.
4. aaIco Icon Editor 3.0
URL: http://www.xceedz.com….
Features: This hasn’t got as many features as the rest, but is a great little icon editor, that will create basic icons. This would be great for the novice designer.
5. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro (version: 1.51)
URL: http://greenfish.extra.hu/downloads.php.
Features: Easy to use, lightweight, requires no installation (portable); Supports file drag and drop; Has multilanguage support (included: English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Serbian, Spanish); Help also available in French, separate download; Click here to help us by translating the program; Sample documents are included; Uses dynamic color depth; Opens and saves in ICO, CUR, ANI, PNG, XPM, BMP and JPEG formats; Can create icons and cursors up to 256×256 @ 32-bit, which can also be PNG-compressed for use in Windows Vista(tm); Can create animated cursors; Can handle images up to 1024×1024 and larger; Can extract icons and cursors from executable files and icon libraries; Can batch convert image files to icons, or to another image format; Has advanced selection handling (marquee, lasso and wand tools, saving/loading selections from files); Offers various gradient styles for filling shapes; Lots of filters including Remove matte, Drop shadow, Inner/Outer glow and Bevel.
View: The interface isn’t as polished as IconDeveloper, not as easy to use as the rest (thats why I haven’t got it at Nu.1), but my god look at the feature list. This is an editor for the pro.
This article was ripped from speckboy.
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