I had an idea to customize a few of my default Vista icons, but had no way of doing so. I had the icon files, but no way to edit them. So after doing some browsing around I did come up with a solution to my icon editing woes.
First Step? Get Paint.NET!
First step was to pickup Paint.NET. This is an awesome free image editor with all the bells and whistles of your hundred-dollar programs.
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
Grab the Paint.NET ICO Plugin
Well worth having, just as a backup image editor if nothing else. Since Paint.net does not have .ico support built in by default, I picked up this plugin from Evan’s Web Site. To use it, all you need to do is unzip and then put it in the “FileTypes” folder in the Paint.NET directory.
Startup Paint.NET and try dragging and dropping an .ico icon onto the canvas. Thanks to this neat plugin, it will open just as any other image would open. With saving as an .ico, I had a few errors at times but doing it again or changing the name of the file seems to have helped.
So there is a totally free way to edit and create custom desktop icons for your next design project or desktop redecoration.
