Create and Modify Icons with Free Icon Editor

When looking for a tool to draw or edit icons, what kind of tools will you consider? A complete photo editing studio loaded with features, filling the entire DVD and with a price of over half a grand? Or a small, compact tool that costs you nothing, downloads in seconds and is optimized for pixel-peeping?

If you're like most designers, you'll go for the second choice. And you'll make the right choice. While it's totally possible to use Adobe Photoshop and alike to create icons, these tools were never meant for this job. Pixel-level graphics lays its own requirements, and the choice of a proper tool is very important for getting perfect end result.

Junior Icon Editor is a free icon editor created by Aha-Soft, a company well-known for its numerous collections of ready-made icons. This is the tool they are constantly using in-house to finish the smallest sizes such as 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, where each pixel matters.

This free icon editor comes with everything you want to create, draw and edit low pixel count icons. Working with color depths of up to 8 bits per R, G, B channel (24-bit True Color), Junior Icon Editor provides full support for the extra 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, bringing the total available color depth of the image to 32 bits. Alpha channel is a dedicated layer that defines a semi-translucent mask for the rest of the image. Based on that mask, some parts of your image can be opaque, transparent, or semi-translucent. This powerful feature brings two important benefits to icons using the Alpha channel. First, you can forget about jagged edges: your icons will always look smooth all around. Second, your icons will fit smoothly on busy backgrounds including all kinds of colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are used in all systems such as Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Android, Blackberry and iPod/iPad devices.

If you need support for terminal applications, Nokia phones or very old systems, you can save legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Regarding compatibility, the free icon editor can open and save icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR file formats. You can use icons in these formats on most desktop and mobile system existing.

The icon editor includes numerous of handy tools to create and edit icons at pixel level. You can draw icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a number of geometric shapes such as circles, rectangles, lines and curves. You can change separate pixels with a sharpie. Existing icons can be rolled, rotated, shifted or mirrored. For 8-bit images, you can choose or edit available palette. True Color icons can use the entire spectrum.

Junior Icon Editor is light and fast. Best of all, it's absolutely free. Get your copy of this free icon editor at free-icon-editor.com.