PhotoIcons

Readers of this Ezine, as well as its print predecessors, will all tell you that I love icons. And, following that, I absolutely adore PhotoIcons because it makes it extremely simple to produce the very latest thing in icon technology: photorealistic icons.
There are a couple of programs out there which will let you do screen captures to create icons. You can make photorealistic icons with them by opening, say, Photoshop, loading the picture you want to use, and then doing the screen capture from Photoshop.

Ah, there's the rub (as William Shakesphere used to say). You did, indeed, get a photorealistic icon, but it was not always up to snuff for several reasons. Of course, until PhotoIcons came along, that was the best you could do.
I am not sure what the magicians who created PhotoIcons do, other than to fine-tune the pallete process, but fine-tune it

they do.
   Take a look at the screen shot of my adorable granddaughter above and see how the colors change so gradually to achieve the icon preview. Is this great or what? Want to know something even better? You can load this picture from a file if you want, capture the screen (it will do the reduction automatically) or, with an optional component, even scan in a picture directly to PhotoIcons.
   PhotoIcons has lots of other bells and whistles, including the usual mundane icon editor functions. Its dialog box displays icons and it even has the ability to create icon libraries as .DLL files.
   To be honest, the icon editing functions could be better, but there are other icon editors out there which will do that job, particularly Icon Edit Pro, which we recently reviewed. But creating photorealistic icons is what PhotoIcon is all about and it performs this duty in an outstanding way.
If you want to have photorealistic icons in your system, run, do not walk, to get a copy of PhotoIcons.

Download a Shareware sample of PhotoIcons