Making Icons in PSP
You can make icons in PSP,
but there is a little trick to it. First let's pick an image to turn
into an icon. I'm going to use a friend's dolphin image. It's
a bit taller than it is wide, so I'm going to try and square it up a bit
by eye. Then when it looks pretty square, I'm going to resize it
to 45x45, the typical icon size. Unless you have started with a perfectly
square image, make sure you uncheck maintain aspect ratio. If you
have any resizing questions, check that part of the tutorial.
I did two examples of the
dolphin as an icon. First I made the simple 45x45 resize. I
thought it could use a border, so I went back and resized the image at
41x41 and then added a 2 pixel black border. You have to remember
that when you add a border to double the pixel count when figuring overall
size. I now have two images I want to save as icons. I go to
the File Menu, choose save as, and scroll down to Windows bmp. In
the file name box I then type in dolphin.ico. The image is really
a bmp, but you have fooled it into accepting the image as an icon.
If you want a transparent
icon, the background has to be a solid white or black. There is a
shade of blue that will become transparent, but it's a bit hard to get
the right color.
I'm going to give you
a few of the icons we have made plus a few of our favorites we have found.
And of course there are some cat icons in the zip, but hey.....I do have
6 cats! I do think you will like our pretty abstract icons.
If you were to save all of these to a folder and then browse them with
PSP, you would notice that some of them like the Celtic ones don't show
up. That's because they are a true icon and not a bmp
pretending to be an icon. Oh well.....they work as icons, that's
what counts! Most of these icons are 45x45, but a few are 32x32.
You will note if you view them in PSP that some of them seem to have a
white or black background, but they become transparent on the desktop.
Oh...and there is even one or two with that particular shade of blue.
Here's a wee preview of the zip file.
Download the icons.zip.....28
icons, 55kb
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