IcoFX 3.9

Overview

IcoFX is a modern icon and cursor editor. With this tool you can design professional graphics that can be used as icons for Windows or Macintosh and cursors for the mouse pointer. It includes every tool that a decent image editing software has, like brushes, effects, color correction tools, selection tools as well as layer support. When you want to create, extract or export many files at once you can do so since IcoFX has support for batch processing files.

Installation

When you run the installer, you will notice that there is a checkbox in the User Agreement notice at the bottom which allows you to do a custom installation. This means that you get to change installation directory, shortcuts and file associations with IcoFX. If you don’t want to change the default settings for any of these, then continue without enabling the checkbox.

The program can run fine under any Windows XP, Vista or 7 OS.

Interface

When you launch the program, a wizard will appear that asks you what you want to do. You can start a new icon/cursor/image project, open an existing file or extract icons from files, create Windows/Mac icon or a cursor from an image, or create a new icon/cursor library. At the bottom of this window is a box with useful tips. You can disable the wizard from appearing at startup by unchecking the checkbox at the bottom left corner.

The main window is divided into many areas: the menu bar, toolbar and tool properties bar at the top, the sidebar on the left side, the editing area at the center and preview, history, info, brushes gradients etc. located on the right side of the window.

Pros

You can create icons and cursors not only for Windows but Macintosh as well. Furthermore, you can convert between Macintosh and Windows icons with minimum effort. Animated cursors are supported too.

You can use as an icon any image, and even extract icons from files EXE, DLL, OCX, Mac Binary, AppleSingle and AppleDouble. Importing and exporting to any of those formats is supported: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, JPEG2000, BMP, ICO, CUR, ANI, ICNS, ICL, CUL and IFX. You can use all those functions with multiple files at once.

Editing the image is the main feature of the program, which gives you the ability to manipulate the image in any way you want. You can add effects, correct colors, change hue, saturation, luminance or adjust brightness and contrast. You can also choose between different brush sizes, shapes and hardness, blending modes or create layers for more effective editing.

Cons

Well, it used to be a freeware but it was changed to shareware at some point, something that is not particularly appealing to PC users. But that’s not really a con, as the developers should be rewarded for their efforts.

Alternatives

IconWorkshop (paid) and Grafx2 (free) are two very trustworthy and popular software that you can use to design icons, cursors and graphics in general. However they are not superior to IcoFX since they all have about the same features, and it’s more of a personal taste and purpose to decide which one is better.

Conclusion

IcoFX has an extensive features list and is capable of performing many unique actions. It serves its purpose more than well enough, and it certainly gets 5 stars from us as a top choice in its category.