OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Multimedia
Saving OS/2 icons - OS/2 icon format in 2017
Dave Yeo:
Things like the icon on your desktop is a plain icon, added to the executable as a resource, most of the rest are pngs.
Andreas Kohl:
--- Quote from: David Graser on December 20, 2017, 11:35:08 pm ---The problem occurs when the picture is pasted to the 16x16 and 20x20. If that color is not in the palette, some off the wall color or colors are used.
--- End quote ---
That's the correct behaviour for the System palette. No big difference under Windows. Good icon editors offer palette management functions. But it's about 196 and 324 different pixels (theoretically).
--- Quote ---Using 24bit, icon editor has no problem rendering the correct color(s). However, you are correct in that it might much simplier to make the smaller icons with few colors.
--- End quote ---
It depends on the display driver and the representation. Colour management can be tricky between Windows/OS2 and Mac or UNIX.
Martin Iturbide:
Thanks for the replies.
For the moment it seems to me that David's suggestions is the best to maintain "IconEdit compatiblility". Even that an 128x128 icon may work (created with PMView) and displays on the screen, it generates some problems with IconEdit. So I guess I should stick to 32x32 as max for OS/2 icons.
IconEdit may open 128x128 icon but if you add more "devices", or try to save it as 2.0, it will start showing problems.
Regards
Alex Taylor:
In my experience, the best way to produce colour-accurate icons is to create them as 24-bit bitmaps first. This requires using a 'placeholder' background colour in place of what will end up as transparent areas (this should be a colour that doesn't otherwise appear in the image; I normally use light magenta).
Then, open the bitmap in Embellish and convert it to Palette mode – this will down-convert it to 8-bit colour. Embellish usually (about 95% of the time in my experience) does a better job of this than PMView, although it depends on the image. Save the bitmap, preferably under a new filename.
Then, open the image in PMView. If it's not already cropped to the correct size, do so now (do NOT resize it, however, as this will undo the colour down-conversion and you'll have to repeat the previous step with Embellish again). Then copy the image into the clipboard from PMView. Open a blank icon file template which has the correct resolution already defined and selected (e.g. 40x40, 8-bit palette) and paste the image in. Assuming the clipboard image dimensions exactly match the icon's image dimensions, the palette in Icon Editor will automatically be converted to match the image in the clipboard. This only seems to work if you used PMView to copy the image – I'm guessing PMView knows how to add the palette information to the clipboard alongside the image.
Finally, in the Icon Editor, replace the placeholder colour with transparent background.
Joop:
I played a lot with IconEditor. With the right template you can go up to 256x256 icons. You can save them too, you can use them too, but OS/2 or eCS will downsize it to 40x40. So what's the point? Always work in 24 bit, even if its much less. Has to do with colors which are not in the palette and I refuse to make separate palettes for each icon. Usually it will take less then five minutes to make an icon with 16x16, 20x20, 32x32 and 40x40. You have to remember that in the editor things show ugly and rough, but as soon as it is started as an icon at the right size it looks rather smooth. I never got 2.0 working, somewhere in the editor its disabled. I'm working mostly with PMView and IconEditor, when it totally sucks I try Embellish > PMView > IconEditor. Key to good icons is go first to a square with sizes which can be divided to the right size. Example 256 > 128 > 64 >32 > 16 and 320> 160> 80> 40> 20. You can start bigger. If it isn't these value's or bigger, first make it so in the highest resolution because you won't see the loss in the smaller one's. If you don't start with these sequence, its not necessary to start with 320, 256 or less, you will end up in the icon size with losses which will give rough edges or can damage the appealing factor. Mind that small things are not noticeable, so your icon must consist of simple things which are also recognizable when its 20x20 or 16x16.
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