Crafting images

“Crafting” is composing a folder icon from an image (a .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif or even a .ico file) in the “Crafter”, the main composition window. The Crafter is used when you want to use any picture from your hard disk and play with the templates, colors, textures and styles to compose a final icon that will be finally saved to your collection and applied to a folder.

Accepted file types

The file types you can craft as icons are:

·         Portable Network Graphics (*.png), either with transparent or opaque background.
PNG files can have 256 colors in 8 bits mode or 16 million colors in 24 bits mode. They may contain multiple frames (animated PNG), but icomancer only takes the first frame for composing.

·         Graphics Interchange Format (*.gif), either with transparent or opaque background.
GIF files can have 256 or less colors and, depending on the color range, may be encoded using less than 8 bits.
GIF files are usually small, and mainly used for animations over the web. As with animated PNGs, icomancer will use the first frame for composing.
Since GIF files are encoded in low resolution, it is not recommended to use them with icomancer.

·         Windows Bitmap (*.bmp), which usually come in 256 or 16 million colors, but they are converted to 24 bit PNGs for easy handling internally.

·         JPEG bitmap (*.jpg, *.jpeg), the most widely used image format.

·         Windows icon (*.ico)
Icon files usually contain different sizes and color depths of the same image. When crafting from an icon, icomancer first extracts all the images and grabs the biggest one with the highest color depth for composing.

The resolution is important!

icomancer builds icons in the most common sizes, starting at 256x256 pixels. Any image you want to craft with icomancer should have, at least, these dimensions. Smaller images are going to be expanded and losing quality in the process.

When saving the crafted images into your local collection, a resized copy of the source image is stored. The final image in your collection will have a maximum width or height of 512 pixels (depending on its aspect ratio) and 16 million colors. JPEG files are stored as-is and the other types are converted to PNG.

The “Skeleton”

When you save a crafted icon, you can set the selected Template, Color, Texture and Style as a default template. This default template is what we call the “Skeleton”, and it is used to “embody” images into it in quick steps. So, by defining a Skeleton, you’ll lately set similar icons to other folders or shortcuts in a quick way.