14 DAY TRIAL // IconCool Editor is a user-friendly icon editor that gives you the freedom to personalize your operating system with icons and cursors. Advanced features such as filters and special effects are included in the package in order to help professional graphic designers create icons for software and websites.
This freeware runs all Windows operating systems and enables you to generate icons from scratch, import image files, which can be edited, or capture existing icons.
IconCool Editor makes the creating and editing easy by offering support for several draw and effect tools, different icon formats that you can choose from or custom size, opacity, hue and color adjustments, as well as color depth tuning options.
Well-organized set of features
The user interface resembles the one implemented by graphic editors, so users familiar with those looks will experience no difficulties in tweaking the dedicated parameters. There’s support for a help manual in case you want to find out additional information about the program’s editing capabilities.
The work area is divided into several smart panels that let you quickly access the editing utilities, alter the color by selecting from a wide range of options integrated within a palette, check out the icons, which are displayed as grids of cells, each representing a pixel, and preview the generated icon in a floating window.
The tool doesn’t embed a multi-tabbed layout for helping you work with different icons at the same time, but it puts an icon list area at your disposal for keeping track of up to ten projects.
You can make the program show or hide the grid, switch between a line or dotted grid, and select the background color or upload a custom image file from your computer.
Importing and exporting options
IconCool Editor lets you import image files with the following file formats: BMP, DIB, EMF, GIF, ICB, ICO, ICL, JPG, JPEG, PBM, PCD, PCX, PGM, PNG, PPM, PSD, PSP, RLE, SGI, TGA, TIF, TIFF, VDA, VST, WBMP, and WMF. Plus, the tool is able to extract icons from EXE, DLL, or ICL file format.
When it comes to saving options, you may print or export the icons to BMP, CUR, GIF, JPG, ICL, ICO, PNG, WBMP, EMF, WMF, TGA, or TIF file format.
Comprehensive package of editing tools
When it comes to creating a new icon, you can choose between several preset size values, such as 16x16, 32x32, 40x40, 48x48, 64x64, 72x72, 80x80, or 256x256, or manually enter the desired size, as well as select the color, namely monochrome, 16 colors (4-bits), 256 colors (8-bits), true color (24-bits), or true colors + alpha.
The capturing mode is specifically designed for helping you grab a portion from your desktop and import it in the workspace for future editing operations.
A smart feature enables you to work with two colors at the same time by simply clicking the left and right mouse buttons. Plus, you may change the RGB values and adjust the brightness.
What’s more, you can fill in areas using different colors, activate the spray, apply gradient effects to the desired image area (you can make use of varied ones: linear, rectangular, radial and others), and embed user-defined text messages, which can be customized in terms of font, font style, size, color, gradient effect, and position.
Other notable characteristics worth being mentioned enable you to undo or redo your actions, perform basic editing operations with the selected image area (cut, copy, paste, delete), zoom in or out, change the icon size and color depth, flip or rotate the photo to different angles, use a color picker for checking out the RGB values for each color added in the working environment, as well as shift the image to the left-right or up-down.
Effects, filters, colors, and other handy features
You can play with a wide range of effects, such as wave, hammer, tile, mosaic, noise, refection, and 3D effects (for this particular option you may alter the transparency, shadow size, blurring depth, and shadow color), as well as insert 3D button effects for any icons. For all of the aforementioned effects, you can make use of sliders in order to adjust their intensity. .
The Outline filters included on the feature list are blur, soften, sharpen, high-pass, anti-alias, edge finding and enhancing options, as well as elliptical mask. Plus, you can use Distortion (ripple, shake, stretch, wind, swirl, fish eye, textured glass), Stylize (e.g. emboss, diffuse, invert, neon trace, posterize, solarize, black and white), and Buttonize filters (smooth, simple, ellipse).
Color palette management operations are supported in order to help you save the current color palette to PAL file format, erase unused colors from the current color palette and rebuild it, use favorite colors, and work with favorite colors or Windows XP sample colors.
If the numbers of the colors you use is bigger than the number permitted for the current color depth, the tool lets you erase any colors that are not used, replace the surplus colors with the most similar ones, convert the color depth to 24-bits, or cancel the last operation (the color depth is not changed).
Last but not least, the tool lets you send the current icon to AIM directly and make file associations.
The Good
Another advantage brought to the table is the possibility to create icons from scratch, upload custom images from your computer, or capture an existing icon.
The Bad
Quite annoying is the main panel that you are confronted with every time you run the program. It displays advertising material about the company’s software products and lets you purchase or download the desired one.
