[How To]: Create Custom Icons

[SiMoNsAyS]

Introduction

Most of you would ever wonder about an easy way on how to create your own icons, alpha blended and big sized like 192x192. Here comes your solution!

Preparing

Things you need, if you don't have 1 of the 3, then don't continue with this method:

Photoshop CS (or lower), Gif Movie Gear for Icons (shareware) and the actions file here.

Hands at work

Some of you won't know about Photoshop actions, once you start understanding how they work you can built your own, take your time to familiarize with it.

Start downloading my actions file.

Iconize!

Extract it to "%PROGRAMFILES%\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Required" or similar dir on lower versions. Now on Photoshop look for the actions tab; click the top-right arrow and select load actions (if you can't find the actions tab take a look on the "window" menu next to help), navigate to the action file.

Once you've loaded the action start creating your icon, here you can have any type of image supported by photoshop with/out transparency, apply shadows, effects, filters... show your creativity! Better to leave image on 128x128 size.

After that select my action "Iconize by BioHaZaRD" and execute it. You won't see image have changed after the process.

If you look now on your C:\ root you'll find lot of files named like Icon*x*.png, all of them were created by Photoshop.

Open Gif Movie Gear and select all the created PNG files (you can also use Drag & Drop, then save it as a .ICO.

Done!

Icon created will have sizes: 128x128, 96x96, 64x64, 48x48 (alpha and 256 colors), 32x32 (alpha and 256 colors), 24x24 (alpha and 256 colors) and 16x16 (alpha and 256 colors).

You can add or remove image formats and sizes up to 256x256. Good Luck and show your work!

Edited January 13, 2005 by SiMoNsAyS

[XPero]

Well done! That will be useful for everyone, specially newbies