Create And Modify Icons With Free Icon Editor

By Author: Julie Goodwin
Total Articles: 1
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When searching for an utility to create or edit icons, what kind of tools will you consider? A complete graphical editing suite bloated with features, filling the entire DVD and with a price of over half a grand? Or a small, compact tool that costs you nothing, downloads in seconds and is created for pixel-peeping?



If you're like most designers, you'll take the second choice. And you'll make the perfect choice. While it's totally possible to use Corel Draw and alike to create icons, these tools were never made for this task. Pixel-level graphics lays its own requirements, and the choice of a right tool is very important for getting perfect end result.



Junior Icon Editor is a free icon editor developed by Aha-Soft, a company known for its many collections of stock images. This is the tool they use in-house to design the smallest sizes such as 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, where each pixel matters.



This free icon editor comes with everything you need to create, paint and edit raster icons. Working with color depths ...
... of up to 8 bits per R, G, B channel (that's 24 bits in total), Junior Icon Editor offers full support for the separate 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, boosting the total maximum color depth of the icon to 32 bits. Alpha channel is a separate layer that defines a semi-translucent mask for the rest of the image. Depending on that mask, some parts of your icon can be opaque, transparent, or semi-translucent. This powerful feature brings two important benefits to images 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 with busy backgrounds including bright colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are used in many systems including Windows Phone, Vista, Windows 7, Android, Blackberry and iPod/iPad devices.



If you need support for terminal applications, Nokia phones or legacy systems, you can make legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Regarding compatibility, the free icon editor can import and export icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR file formats. You can use icons in these formats on every desktop and mobile system in existence.



The icon editor provides a number of handy tools to create and edit icons at pixel level. You can draw icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a number of geometric shapes such as ellipses, rectangles, lines and curves. You can change separate pixels with a sharpie. Existing icons can be rolled, rotated, shifted or reflected. For 256-color icons, you can choose or edit available palette. True Color icons will use the entire spectrum.



Junior Icon Editor is small and fast. Best of all, it's absolutely free. Download your copy of this free icon editor at free-icon-editor.com.