ArtIcons Pro

Edit and create great looking windows icons with ArtIcons Pro.
Now with the power and capabilities of this tool one can find, extract, edit and create professional custom and unique software icons for your Windows XP and Windows Vista icons. This tool is capable to create and edit icons in standard sizes, custom sizes and color depths up to 16 million. It allows creating and storing images with several layers, paint images with gradient and chess effects. The tool allows importing and exporting ICO, Vista ICO, CUR, BMP, JPG, PNG, PSD, WBMP, GIF images with editing options like shadow, opacity, smooth, negative, grayscale and much more. One can improve images by replacing colors and create more efficient storage by managing icon libraries. With the simple interface of the tool even a novice user can easily master it.
The tool allows to convert Mac icons to Windows format and is available in English, Spanish, German and many more languages.

ArtIcons Pro provides great opportunities for working with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons. You will be able to handle Vista Icons with ease. In order to make Vista icons compatible with Windows XP you can save them without any compression.
Vista Icons introduce a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows imagery. First, the style of Windows Aero-style icons is more realistic than illustrative, but not quite photorealistic. The icons are symbolic images - they should look better than photorealistic. Second, icons have a maximum size of 256 x 256, making them suitable for high-DPI displays. These high-resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons. Finally, wherever practical, fixed document icons are replaced by thumbnails of the content, making documents easier to identify and find. Thus, Articons Pro is a beeline to refining the visuals of your program and making it more communicative for users.
A picture of a maximum size of 256 x 256 to be used as an icon, in principle, is supported by XP, yet such an icon occupies 400Kb of disk space, which is far more than standard 25Kb of an XP icon. Aha-Soft has again found a way to cast off these shackles: Articons Pro uses advanced PNG compression to save images without losses and supports semitransparent images with 8bit alpha channel. That technology reduces the size of an icon only, leaving the quality invariable.
Articons Pro will help you to obtain the modern Windows Vista look. All you need is just to redesign your program's most prominent icons to use the Aero-style. From this time onwards Vista Icons crafted by Articons Pro will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. Articons Pro will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.