Have you been wanting to create your own icons, but haven’t been able to find the software to do it? With IcoFX you can make icons in no time at all, and it’s not going to cost you a dime! What can IcoFX do for you? Check it out:
- Support for Vista icons with PNG compression
- Create icons for Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista
- More than 40 effects, including Drop Shadow
- Supports dozens of different languages
- Resolutions up to 256×256
- Extract icons (including Vista icons) from 32 bit exe and dll
- Import / export images (transparency also)
- Many useful drawing tools like brush, line, rectangle and more
- Transparent, Brighten/Darken, Blur/Sharpen tools for retouching
- Create icon from an image with a single click
- Adjust the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, transparency and color balance of icons
- and much more
I played around with IcoFX for a little while using some icons from Iconfinder, as well as some sources in Ashley’s icon article. I have to say that it was extremely easy to use, and being able to extract icons from EXE files (such as the Firefox executable) is a nice touch.
This freeware app (for Windows only) was found by ResearchWizard, and a big thanks goes to Ttech who originally mentioned the app (it was accidentally misspelled though). Those comments were on a post Ashley did in regards to downloading and changing your icons in Windows. She also mentioned some programs you could use to create your own icons, but they all costed over $40. We looked for a free icon editor for quite awhile and came up empty handed, but our commenters came through for us!
Have you seen you can extract icons from multiple files at once using Batch processing?
There are several other free icon applications (I don’t know if this applies to every entry in the list):
IconEdit32 (this one is from PC Magazine, free but kind of restricted to buy some magazine in the past)
@icon sushi
AWicons (lite)
PixelToolbox
SnIco Edit 2 (snidesoft.com is offline)
Z-Icontool
Forgive me I don’t have the time right now to search for all the links and examine the exact licenses. I didn’t like any of this small pixel apps and always switched back to Paint.Net or Gimp as I didn’t need multi-size icons and mainly produced favicons.
I didn’t notice the batch extraction of icons the first time through the program, but the second time I was using it I did see that. It’s a really nice feature.
Thanks for the other apps, too! I’ll look into those.