Easily Design Gorgeous Graphics for Applications

Every piece of software available on the Internet is firstly defined by the icon that describes in a small picture the essential functionality of the application. Having a well designed icon for the application is definitely a small but important aspect that decides whether your application will be anonymous or well-known.

There are many graphic editors that you can use and it is hard to make a decision regarding the best features, smallest price, easy-to-use interface and other standards. Opacity is one of the screen graphic editors that you can use to create icons for your application and it offers a lot of features to choose from.

The Looks

When opening the application for the first time, you’ll be asked what kind of project you want to start. Opacity offers a wide range of ready-designed templates, and you can choose the appropriate one for the job you want to do. The templates include: Pref Pane icon, Desktop icon, application icon, document icon, application button, status menu, dashboard icon, web graphics, iPhone icon, iPhone button and many more.

The Works

After selecting the template, you’ll be presented with the editor window, where you can start designing your graphics. The most important tools are available on the upper part of the window, and these are: select tool, zoom, pixels, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, pen, spiral, line and text. Anything you may imagine starts with the basic usage of these tools.

Like any self-respecting graphic editor, Opacity offers layers to work with and you can combine these layers with the many graphic effects included in the application. All the effects are available in the Layers menu and, to name a few, these include: glass, shadow, blur, sharpen, reflection, transition, halftone, distortion, color, composite operation. Just imagine the multitude of unique and gorgeous designs that you can create using these effects.

The Vectors that you draw using Opacity will look great in every screen resolution and you can also use pixels to make each resolution pixel perfect. A Preview function is available in the upper-right corner of the application and with just one click, you can see how your design looks. With Opacity, you easily export images in any supported format just by clicking a button. The factories will help you upload, email or instant message an image to your collaborators (or clients).

With the Inspector, you can easily change properties for vectors, layers, image and factories. For the vectors, you can set the position, size, scale, angle, font, alignment and more. The Image Inspector window enables you to specify the metadata information like: title, artist, copyright, keywords, size, resolution, units, color space and background. You can change every single property and setting for the graphics, so you’ll know that your creation is unique and you own full copyright.

The Preferences menu allows you to easily change settings for the application, so you can feel comfortable working with your own settings. From the Keys Preferences window, you can edit the shortcut keys for the most important and used tools. Simply click on the name of the tool and record a new shortcut key. You can also edit the Transforms menu to display the operations you want. After you spend a little time with Opacity, you’ll find that some operations have a higher usage than others, and you can easily customize the Transforms menu to display the ones that have the highest usage. Opacity also allows the installation of optional extras like: Extra Filters and Hex Color Picker. All these settings can be modified for your own comfort.

The Good

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The Truth