Icon Craft Reviewer's Comments
Icon Craft by Icon Empire wins our “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” for best Icon designing software. Icon Craft offers a comprehensive package that creates, edits and manages icons. This program supports Windows XP and Windows Vista icons and Icon Craft has an additional tool for creating cursors.
Create and edit icons in standard and custom formats with color depth up to 32-bit True Color. Icon Craft supports a huge number of import and export image types including ICO, BMP, JPEG, ANI, CUR, GIF, PNG, TGA and more.
Icon Craft has all the drawing tools and editing features you need to take full control of your icon designs. The library tools are not included in the main interface like our #1 product, but they are accessible and useful for extracting, importing, exporting and sorting icons. The library will even scan the internet or a specific link for icon images.
With Icon Craft you can create icons from web images, clipboard contents, digital images and more. You can extract icons from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files to create a big object resource. Icon Craft supports a number of image file types for importing and exporting including Adobe Photoshop PSD image formats.
Or you can create impressive, original designs using the draw tools and color palettes. Create smooth semi-transparent icons, static and animated cursors for Windows XP. You can create icons in standard and custom sizes with color depth up to 32-bit True Color.
Editing Icons:
You can modify images with a variety of effects such as drop shadow, opacity, smooth, negative grayscale, colorize and more. Additionally, you can customize your desktop and folders or change icon formats by removing, adding, changing or converting. You can paint images with gradient or chess fill or modify icons contained inside executables. To save time and create a similar group of icons you can convert or apply effects to multiple icons at once. A unique feature to this program is the ability to work with layers and view them with the Display/Hide Layers feature.
Managing Icons:
Icon Craft's library provides more tools and features than any other library included in icon design software. Icon Craft's library can manage icons, static and animated cursors, icon libraries and image lists.
Through the library you can create new libraries and manage the icons within by adding, sorting, editing, importing or exporting your icons to and from the library. The library will also extract icon objects from your system or you can download them from the internet or from an internet link. All icons are quickly displayed when you open the library and you can change the view of these icons to see them in different formats.
Ease of Use:
Icon Craft is easy to use; its interface is intuitive and well-organized. However, tutorials are not available.
Help/Support:
The help documentation for this program is simple to follow. It outlines the toolbars and the various functions involved in the program. Icon Empire offers FAQ and email support online.
Summary:
Icon Craft is a great software package for icon creation, editing and organizing. This program supports a large number of formats for both importing and exporting and its library tool includes more options for extracting and maintaining icons than any other program.
