Microangelo Studio provides a broad range of drawing tools, as well as gradient and anti-aliasing effects to create high-quality images. Studio offers additional tools and features when editing Windows XP icons. Authors who demand or require more powerful graphic design features should consider using a vector tool such as Macromedia FreeHand or Adobe Illustrator to create vector graphics and Adobe Photoshop to convert these images into raster graphics of the desired size. Microangelo will accept the Photoshop images directly from PSD files.
Create three sizes of the image. Because there will be a two-pixel
drop shadow added to the image later, you should follow these
guidelines:
Microangelo: Create Windows XP image
formats in the sizes of
48x48, 32x32, and 16x16. Leave the bottom two rows and right
two coloumns of pixels empty (transparent).
Photoshop: Create sizes of 46×46, 30×30, and 14×14 pixels.
Use the palette and style characteristics outlined earlier in
the Preparation section.
Note Photoshop is the recommended image creation tool because Microangelo Studio offers a direct import of Photoshop files. Any image created in Photoshop that uses the "RGB" mode has an alpha channel attached. If there is transparency in the image or layer, the alpha channel includes transparency information that Studio processes into the Windows XP image format.
Previous Home Next |