In the video above is IcoFX, a freeware icon editor for Windows. While it’s true there are other more powerful graphics editors like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, IcoFX’s simplicity definitely makes it worth having installed. If you do any sort of web design work, whether personally or professionally, a custom favicon.ico file is more or less mandatory...

If you are into digital photography and are looking to create some professional looking panoramic photos, then check out the open source application: Hugin. Panorama stitching and more. A powerful software package for creation and processing of panoramic images. Reading about this a bit, some users complain the interface is a bit difficult/convoluted to work...

Over the course of the weekend the not-so sweet smell of a burning circuit board started coming out of my PC, so I did what anybody else would do, I mashed the power button and shut the computer off immediately. When the choice comes between having your PC become a literal fiery mess or have a corrupted OS from an improper shutdown, which to go with is fairly...

Whenever you get a call from a number you don’t recognize, you can do a reverse lookup to find out a little more about who the caller is. So from that line of thinking, TinEye allows you to do a reverse lookup on an image file. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used,...

If you do any web development where you are generating your own layout and templates, it is inevitable that you will need to put rounded corners on a box or border. This can be a real pain if you have to go into your graphics editor and match colors, etc., etc., etc. Instead, try the site RoundedCornr. This generates a basic box with rounded corners. It will...

For those of you who like to create and manipulate 3D images, an alternate to pricey commercial packages is the open source application, Blender. Blender run on any operating system and has a pretty impressive feature list and is capable of producing professional quality output. I am not really a graphics person so I am going to avoid calling attention to...

If you are developing a web site or a program, adding color and graphics is definitely a way to make your product look much more professional. Of course, not all of us are graphic artists so any free graphics are always welcome. A while ago I posted a link to famfamfam’s fantastic icon set and today I’ll point you to another link which has lots more...

If you make use of the awesome Paint.NET graphics editing application, then this tip is for you. Did you know  about the rather sizable list of available Paint.NET plug-ins? Take a look at the list and see what you like, but here are a few which caught my eye:Pyrochild Plugins Icon, Cursor, and Animated Cursor Format plug-in SmudgeMost all of these plugins...

Everyone loves icons. Whether you are a developer looking for ways to ‘beautify’ your user interface or you are putting together a presentation, attractive icons make a good impression. In the past, I have pointed out the excellent collections from FamFamFam which is free for both private and commericial use. So on that note here are a couple of...

Earlier this week I wrote about making use of the Windows Icon Set embedded in system DLL files. While this can be handy, it becomes somewhat of a burden finding the right DLL file with the icons you want to use. To eliminate this problem, simply extract the icon files with NirSoft’s IconsExtract. This nifty utility allows you to select a file and it pulls...

Often times when I am doing development or support projects, I have users send me screenshots of their errors. Most people drop the screenshot directly into an email, however some users paste their screen captures into a Word document and send that instead. The problem with the image being embedded in an MS Word document is you can only size the image up to the...

For the most part, all graphics you deal with are traditional 2D raster (bitmap style) graphics. While many programs such as GIMP, Photoshop, Paint.NET, etc. are able to combine layers to produce a single image, the result is always a “flat” object. If you want to deal with 3D-esque graphics and manipulation power you get from them, vector graphics...