Plz Help me if any body well know about icon making. i made an icon, i export it .ico file but when i apply it it's result or resolation too poor, how can i creat pretty and beautiful icon creat with good resulotion.
Which is the correct size of icon files, and what are the settings for exporting icons files in good quality.
thanks.
Mohsin Anjum
Icons are 32 x 32 pixels, or 64 x 64 pixels bitmaps. You better paint them one pixel at the time if you want a good quality icon. In PhotoPaint you can create the file with those specifications, and you can create a new windows where you can view at real size, and to work in the original zoomed in.
I've never used CorelDRAW or Photo-PAINT to create an .ICO file directly, so if there are tips on doing that, I'm not familiar with where to point you to them. The main CorelDRAW-specific icon tutorial that comes to mind is the Icon-A-Day 2.0 tutorial by Mormegil (also http://mormegil.wincustomize.com/), but that tutorial is more about "how to be completely freaking awesome" as opposed to talking about "how do I create the various resolutions of my icons and have them look good".
I do want to point out that an .ICO file actually contains multiple resolutions of "the same icon", so when an icon looks particularly good its sometimes not because the author created a really great 48x48 or 32x32 image, but because the same .ICO file has a 64x64 or 128x128 version and the application or OS was capable of displaying it. "The same icon" is in quotes because the differences between 16x16 and 48x48, or between 48x48 and 128x128 are seriously substantial, and there is a lot of detail and even content that sometimes must be dropped as you reduce resolution.
But same as Michael already said, at the lower resolutions you essentially must hand-paint or at least hand-correct a design of any complexity, since resampling down to that size from an application won't know which pixels were important to keep and which weren't. Many times is quicker if not to better effect to just create from scratch, than trying to "correct" the mess made from resampling down to such a small resolution.
For what its worth, after originating designs in CorelDRAW, I export to transparent PNG and bring the image into IcoFX for managing the multiple resolutions and multiple bit depths being saved within the single .ICO file.
-Alan
I hadn't watched it before now, but the Exporting 101 tutorial from Mormegil's CorelDRAW for Skinners tutorials is focused on how to get icons out of CorelDRAW. But he doesn't try and create the actual .ICO files themselves from Corel applications; instead using IconDeveloper from Stardock. The fact that he so specifically favored the one specific resampling algorithm (looks like "Lanczos3") has me curious.