Icons are used for various purposes like favicons, web designs and for Windows/Mac programs. To create or edit icons, users mostly take help of image editors like Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net or icon editors.
Icons editors helps to edit an icon file which is an image file with .ico extension and contains images of different sizes and color depths. Icons editors also helps in creating new icons to replace your default system or program icons, favicons that are used on websites.
Icons editors are only useful if editor has functionality of replacing a program or system icons also called an system icon replacer, otherwise, its very hard to use icons that are created.
There are lots of premium icons editors available in the market, but after a deep research, I came across equally powerful and best free icon editors that help you to create or edit icons. These free icon editors are basically easier to use than any other image editor like Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator and can create professional icons.
So, here’s the SaveDelete’s compilation of Top 5 best free Icon editors to create and edit professional looking icons.
1) Greenfish Icon Editor Pro : GFIE Pro is a powerful icon, cursor, animation and icon library editor. Layer support with advanced selection handling makes it a really professional and unique freeware tool for designing small pixelgraphic images. GFIE offers high-quality filters like Bevel, Drop Shadow and Glow; supports editing animated cursors and managing icon libraries.
2) IcoFX : IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macintosh icons supporting transparency. With a wealth of tools and more than 40 effects at your fingertips, theres virtually no limit to the icons you can create. You can easily convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images. IcoFX gives you the possibility to create icon libraries or change icons inside exe files. Create a favicon for your website or blog.
3) aaICO – Freeware Icon Editor : aaICO – This is a Free Icon Editor that you will find very useful. The editor supports multiple resolutions, importing, exporting, various effects and much more.
4) Stardock Icon Developer : This software is very easy to use and comes with free and paid version. IconDeveloper is a program that makes it very easy to create your own Windows icons. Intead of trying to include a drawing package, IconDeveloper instead allows users to just import images made by other programs and turn them quickly and easily into icons.
5) Free Icon Editor : It’s an easy to use icon maker for creating and editing icons for Windows. With this icon editor you can – Create and edit icons in either standard or custom sizes, in color depths up to 16 million colors. Standard icon sizes are 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, make icons with transparency, make icons for Windows XP in 32-bit color depth with 8-bit alpha channel paint images with pen, brush, airbrush, ellipse, rectangle, line, curve tools and much more.
Bonus Free Icon Editor
6) LiquidIcon XP Editor : LiquidIcon XP is one of the most popular Icon Editors in the world. Best of all, it’s completely FREE (no Adware, Spyware, Guaranteed), portable and lightweight, and works on every version of Windows.
