[Eyenovation]

Greetings. I'm presently working on an icon for a small application I'm helping develop. Can anyone please help me as to what I am doing wrong? For example, I've been using Photoshop and Icongrapher and have had unsatisfactory results. Here are my questions. If anyone can please help me, it'd be MUCH appreciated.

0. Should I be using icongrapher, or another app?

1. What resolution should I be creating the icons in Photoshop? Obviously 128 x 128 as the size but how many DPI? 72? 300? When I've tried importing the PSD icon into incongrapher, I get jagged lines which is less than desirable.

2. What's the proper way to generate shadows? After reading the OSX developer guide on Aqua icons, I understand the perspective and light source issues, but is this something you have to control in Photoshop, or ?? How can you have a shadow and then expect the mask to be perfect?

3. Creating a mask is quite difficult. How do you retain the shadow without getting in extra pixels you're not intending to feature?

As one can see, I'm totally lost. Any guidance would be very welcomed.

[Chuckit]

My approach — I'm not going to say it's the "right way," but it works for me — is to draw the icon in Photoshop on a transparent canvas. Draw it at as many sizes as you need (e.g. if text on the icon would be too small at a tiny size, make another version). Then, drag the PSDs into IconComposer. It respects image transparencies, so if your image had a partially transparent shadow over a transparent background in Photoshop, the resulting icon will have the same transparency.

I find 72 DPI, the resolution of the screen, is quite sufficient. It should look exactly the same as an icon as it did in Photoshop.

EDIT: Rickster's right, I got it backwards. The transparency is PSDs is messy, but it works right in other transparent formats. My bad.

[Rickster]

IMHO, you're looking at this in an unnecessarily complicated way...

0. Whatever floats your boat. I find it simpler to use Icon Composer, which is part of the Xcode/Developer Tools install. Create the icon in Photoshop, then export it to PNG or TIFF (with transparency), and drag it into the IconComposer window.

1. Depending on what app you use to build the icon, it may not matter what the resolution of your Photoshop file is. But it's probably best to stick to 72 dpi, which is the canonical resolution for Mac screens (even though it's rarely the physical resolution anymore).

2. Well, the way I do it, all the pixel-twiddling is in Photoshop, so... yeah. On the technical side: all you need to do is get the icon looking the way you want it in Photoshop, complete with transparency. When you're ready to export to PNG or TIFF, you should see the checkerboard background through the transparent parts of your icon. On the artistic side... there are a million ways to generate shadows, and getting one with the right kind of quasi-realism to match Aqua icons can be hard. For some icons, Photoshop's drop-shadow Layer Style might be all you need.

3. Going by this workflow... you don't need to care about any masks if you don't want to. Do your art starting with transparent layers... use Photoshop's transparency model. If the translucent parts look right in Photoshop before you export (and you export the PNG or TIFF correctly), they'll look right when you import to IconComposer.

A couple of caveats to doing icons this way:
- IconComposer doesn't save icons that are visible in the Finder; it saves .icns files (which is what you'll need if you're doing app or document-type icons for most Mac OS X applications). I use a little utility I wrote to make the icns files Finder-visible when I need to: you'll find it at http://icons.cx/goodies.
- IconComposer looks like it can import PSD files (thanks to QuickTime, via the Cocoa NSImage architecture), but it doesn't hand transparency correctly. Save a copy as PNG (interlaced or not, doesn't matter) or TIFF (image compression:none or LZW, byte order: mac, don't save image pyramid, save transparency, discard layers) from Photoshop before importing to IconComposer.

Hope this helps!