Paint.NET

Here is my icon and cursor format plug-in for Paint.NET

http://www.evanolds.com/IcoCur.zip

Unzip it and put IcoCur.dll in the "FileTypes" folder in the Paint.NET directory.

There are a few screenshots on this page:
http://www.evanolds.com/pdnicocur.html
although not too much to show for a file format plug-in.

It will load and save .ico, .cur and .ani files (.ani as of July 29, 2006).

When loading from an icon or cursor file that contains multiple images, you are given a prompt and allowed to choose which image to load. It always bugged me when there would be 3 or so images in an icon file and other image editors would just auto-load the low resoultion 8x8 one or something like that, so I added the feature to choose.

Although I've never seen any, I suppose there could be icons with 16-bit image data; there is support for this, albeit untested. Please let me know what you think.

Nice Plugin. The ability to open icons/cursors is a nice feature to have in PDN. One suggestion though, When I try to save an icon, it saves it as a 16/16 32bit. it would be nice if you had the option of what format to save an image as. Or, this one would be a bit more complex, an option to save an icon complete with multiple formats. I'm fairly new to PDN and .NET programming so I'm not sure if this is actually possible. Possibly either the ability to save multiple png/bmp etc. files into one icon or, have the different formats all displayed on one image. Again, I'm new to this so I may just be missing something.

I was debating the option to allow saving with different resolutions and color modes. Actually, I guess I still am debating. I may decide to do it later since it would be nice to have both low and high resolution icons in the same .ico file, in fact this is sort of the convention for icon files.

Fairly busy right now, but I'll see if I can get around to it in the future (don't expect it too soon).

Just FYI, icon and cursors internally are basically multiple "limited bitmaps". It sounded like when you said "different formats" you were basically desiring different resolutions and color modes (i.e. ability to export 8-bit icons). This can be done. Embedding any type of compressed image or other image format within an icon cannot be done.

One last thing, you said...
You mean 32x32 @ 32-bit, right? It should export everything as a 32x32.

Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant.



32x32 it is. Sorry about the missinformation.

I meant to post this before but I didn't have the time to set it up.

With the multiple resolutions/sizes of the icon file. Would a mapped image work?
Like this:

without the colors/text of course.

This is a really good plugin that you've got going.

I really need to be able to make icons in arbitrary sizes. I really do need to be able to save icons that are 190x35 or any other arbitrary dimension.

Thanks to your plug-in, I made part of my own cursor set thingy. Here are some examples:




But pointer shadow doesn't work for anything except for the default ones <_<. Great plug-in.

I made some really lazy cursors. Mostly just red dots...

I'll probably add in the ability to just save the icon with whatever resolution it has, as opposed to forcing a resize. I'll see if I can get this into the next version. (Does windows Vista render non-square icons in a non-square fashion? I saved a 190x35 icon in my old image editor, since it had support for this, and of course it just shows up as stretched to square in any windows explorer view, although programs like irfanview load it in as 190x35. Anyway, just curious as to how the icon support in Vista is.)



I think that's because the system expects any "shadow-like" effect to be contained within the alpha channel, since all the cursors currently save as 32-bit. When I get <32 bpp support in, then the pointer shadows should work, but just FYI until then, you can design the shadow in PDN if you wish. There's probably a tutorial on layer shadows somewhere. But, again, this should change when you are allowed to save lower color depth files.



I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here. Are you saying that if you had such an image in PDN, could my plugin recognize the different regions and save each of those images as 128x128, 64x64, 48x48... etc? That's probably unlikely, but if you had each in a separate layer, with just transparent pixels around the images, then I might be able to add a feature to recognize when a layer contains an image that's smaller than the canvas size, or something like that. Anyway, we'll see about that one, I was kind of planning to have the next version just have capabilities for saving different dimension/resoultion versions of the same image... sort of hard to explain what I mean.

I'll see if I can get something out mid-May (a bit busy).

ooo, I like the seperate layer idea alot better than mine. which btw was the region recognition type of thing. wow, I'm sounding pretty stupid on this thread.

hey, this is a really good plugin and should be included with PDN with the initial installation.

i made a set of cursors (and a lot of icons for small applications that i won't show here). Its all nice and blue! (God bless gradients.)

Also, pixel by pixel editing was done for the link select, and some other cursors (including alpha) (You can't really control gradients that efficiently that small on any raster graphics program.)

The cursors are in the following ZIP file: CursorSet.zip

Hi

Is there a way to confgure this plugin so it doesn't degrade during the conversion? When I save something as .ico, it looks blurry compared to the original file.

In the spirit of Paint.Net, will you be releasing the source code?

Great Plugin!
Thanks for sharing.

Ok, I've released the next version. In this version you can save 8-bit and 32-bit icons and cursors. The cursor saving functionality is the same as the previous version, other than the addition of an allowed 8-bit mode.

The icon saver now has the following options dialog:


Many icon files contain multiple resolution and color depth versions of the same image, so if you are authoring this type of icon, you can design the image at whatever resolution you like and then choose the resolutions/color depths to save in the file just by checking the check boxes. PDN's resampling and quantizing (color depth changing) capabilites are utilized so that this is done in an automated fashion.

If you wish to author an icon file with multiple DIFFERENT images in one file you can do this too. For example, some icons have one image for the 32x32 item, and then a different (but often similarly themed) image for the 16x16 since a resize of the 32x32 to 16x16 may be too lossy. To export different images in one file, design each image on a separate layer, with COMPLETELY transparent rows and columns to the left and below your layer's image.

For example, if you're making an icon that will have a 32x32 image and a different 16x16 image in the same file, work with a 32x32 canvas and design the 32x32 image on one layer. Then, on a separate layer (clear it completely to start) design a 16x16 image in the upper left corner. Alternatively, design each image separately and save them as 32x32, 16x16, etc. PDN files and import them as layers into a new document, and then save them. You must work with a canvas size of 256x256 or smaller to save each layer separately (saving the "Merged Image" does not have this restriction) and each layer should have dimensions that are multiples of 8.


There are still resolution restrictions, but if the icon image you are working with is 256x256 or smaller, then you can save it with whatever dimensions it has.


If you design an image with NxN dimensions (where N is just some number<=256) and then save it as NxN (i.e. no resizing) the plug-in should now take it as it is, rather than running it through PDN's super sampler, which caused the "blur". Let me know if this addresses your problem.


I won't be releasing the source code right now, possibly after one more update (it will probably need updating when PDN has major version changes; also I'm thinking of adding .ANI support).

Download link is the same as before:
http://www.evanolds.com/IcoCur.zip

Please post bugs/comments.