When searching for a tool to create or modify icons, what type of products will you look for? A fully featured image editing studio bloated with features, taking the entire DVD and with a price of more than half a grand? Or a small, tiny free tool, downloads in seconds and is created for pixel-peeping?
If you’re like most of us, you’ll take the second choice. And you’ll make the right choice. While it’s possible to use Corel Draw and alike to make icons, these tools were never made for this job. Pixel-level graphics imposes its own requirements, and the choice of a proper tool is important for doing it right.
Junior Icon Editor is a free icon editor developed by Aha-Soft, a design company known for its numerous collections of stock graphics. This is the tool they use in-house to finish the smallest sizes like 16×16 or 32×32 pixels, where each pixel matters.
This free icon editor has everything you want to design, draw and modify raster icons. Working with color depths of up to 8 bits per color channel (that’s 24 bits in total), Junior Icon Editor offers full support for the transparency 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, bringing the combined available 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, different parts of your image can be opaque, transparent, or semi-transparent. This powerful 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 blend smoothly with busy backgrounds including all kinds of colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are supported 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 legacy systems, you can produce legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Talking of compatibility, the free icon editor can import and export icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR formats. You can use icons in these formats on every desktop and mobile system in existence.
The icon editor comes with a number of handy tools to create and modify icons at pixel level. You can draw icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a wide range of geometric shapes such as ellipses, rectangles, lines and curves. You can touch up 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 will use the entire gamut.
Junior Icon Editor is small and quick. Best of all, it’s completely free. Get your copy of this free icon editor at free-icon-editor.com.
By: Julie Goodwin
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