What tools are you likely to use when drawing an icon? Adobe Photoshop or CorelDraw, a natural choice of design professionals, are just too bulky, expensive and complex to learn for most of us. That, and the fact that it hard to use them for drawing icons and almost impossible to save then in a correct format, makes using professional and generic image editors for drawing icons unreasonable.
The needs of a casual designer or someone who needs to draw small-pixel images such as icons, buttons and small logotypes are different from those of photographers or painters.
An icon drawing application has to be optimized for handling small images and saving them in a proper file format such as Windows ICO, GIF or BMP. So why paying top dollar for something that does not even fit the bill when there are better alternatives?
ArtIcons Pro by Aha-Soft is a dedicated image editor to create, edit and modify Windows icons and small-pixel images. It has every feature imaginable for such a small application.
With ArtIcons Pro, you can create or edit icons in all imaginable standard and custom formats and color resolutions from 16-color terminal icons to slick and translucent true-color images used in Windows XP and Vista.
Numerous drawing tools make it easy to design a perfect icon, while easy effects make tweaks of existing images a snap. There are tools to add a drop shadow, control opacity and smoothness, invert, convert to grayscale or colorize icons, control hue and saturation, rotate, roll and mirror icons with a single click.
Multi-layer support resembles one available in Adobe Photoshop, allowing you design complex icons with shared elements. ArtIcons Pro allows opening and saving multi-layer images in addition to ICO, ICPR, BMP, JPEG and PNG formats.
ArtIcons Pro is not limited to drawing and transforming icons. The tool allows creating and managing icon libraries or collections, extracting icons from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files, and even processing entire folders to create a collection. Do you know how many useable icons there are in Windows? Figure it out by pointing ArtIcons Pro to C:\Windows\! The tool will process all Windows files and libraries, extracting icons into a dedicated icon library.
ArtIcons Pro is perfect for creating and editing icons and for managing icon libraries. It is small, compact, fast, inexpensive and tailored to do a particular job. What more do you wish for? Download a free demo version from Aha-Soft.
Since SibCode's founding in 2005 and as of 2007, Dmitry Costenco develops web sites. He works for quality web interface, which will help to web surfers.
