Problem creating icons..

ranjithkr1 · 09-29-2005

I have been involved in creating lot of icons for some application for our team of developers, in a application. Recently i developed passion towards vector art and it has been fascinating me ever since. Now, i designed some cool icons in corel designer 12....so that, i could import them into PS as eps in any flexible sizes.....Till then all were fine.....But after i imported and completed the icon sets, there was a problem waiting for me. The smooth edges of the graphic was killing the transparency in some icons. i had to save them in gif format and after doing so, the icons that were supposed to be transparent was developing a patchy white area since the edges were too smooth for the gif format to support transparency...

I would like to know if there is any technique to get rid of those ugly transparency whites, from the icons, apart from deleting each pixels in the edge of the designs..?????
it is really frustrating to cut out those tiny pixels out....

Can anyone help me..????

**Man1c M0g** · 09-29-2005

Unfortunately this is a limitation of the .GIF format - the transparency is either on or off, and there is no half-way transparency (or 'alpha'). There really is no way to fix this with .GIF, but you might want to try .PNG - that format supports full 256-bit alpha, at the cost of reduced compatability and increased filesizes...

scrowler · 09-30-2005

you could use .htaccess to mask a png file as an ico file, but it would only work in non IE browsers

**Man1c M0g** · 09-30-2005

Just as an added point, ICO files do support a full range of alpha - you just need to make sure that you encode to the right format. A good icon creation package could help you lots here.

Creativity · 12-11-2005

Try Icon creating softwares like ArtIcons.. because it has helped me a lot with creation of icons that have transparency and drop shadow effects.

zapphnath · 12-13-2005

There is a freeware app. called @iconsushi, which you can get at http://www.towofu.net/soft/e-aicon.php that easily converts other file-formats, including Photoshop PSDs, to ICOs.
I sat around, one day, for about an hour, and made about thirty different icons, just for the heck of it. I'm even using a few of them.

friend_kami · 12-15-2005

im just curious, speaking about transparency, doesnt .gif have that magic purple as transparent?

or what fileformat is that?
bitmap?