I’ve been starting to get quite annoyed with problems surrounding creating icons for use in eclipse applications. Windows needs either alot of icons in 8bit and 32bit or one ico containing all of those images. Anyhow after some trying I found out how I could get this done.
- First you create your icon in a large enough size so you don’t loose any information
- Then you use gimp and create all the 32bit versions by just resizing the image to 48×48, 32×32 and 16×16. These you can keep in the RGB mode and then save as BMP’s
- All the 8-bit images created nearly the same. You just need to change the mode to indexed and then change the maximum number of colours to 255 for 8bit.
- You can create an ico file with the imagemagick package in linux with the following command:
convert image1_16_8bit.bmp image2_16_32bit.bmp.... -channel Alpha -negate image.ico
- Then go into the Eclipse product page and choose each icon respectively
I have finally found a solution for creating proper indexed images with only 255 colours and thus being 8bit.
The command line with convert would be as follows for 8bit:
convert -colors 255 -resize 16×16 -type Palette -channel Alpha icon_blue.png icon_blue_16x16_8bit.bmp
and as follows for 32bit:
convert -resize 16×16 -channel Alpha icon_blue.png icon_blue_16x16_32bit.bmp
The option which is important here is the ‘-type Palette’. This tells imagemagick to use a colour palette and the ‘-colors 255’ option says how many.