ArtIcons

ArtIcons the only name you can trust on when you would like to Edit and create great looking windows icons.
As the name suggests with the help of this tool one can find, extract, edit and create professional custom and unique software icons compatible for your Windows XP and Windows Vista. The many capable features of this tool can be listed as follows; allows creating and editing icons in standard sizes, custom sizes and coloring depths up to 16 million colors, creates and stores images with several layers, paint images with gradient and chess effects, import and export ICO, Vista ICO, CUR, BMP, JPG, PNG, PSD, WBMP, GIF images with editing options like shadow, opacity, smooth, negative, grayscale and much more. One can also convert Mac icons to Windows format, Modify icons inside executables and other program files, and much more.
Available in English, Spanish, German and many more languages this tool with a simple interface makes a novice user to easily master it.

ArtIcons provides great opportunities for working with Windows 8/7/Vista/XP icons. You will be able to handle Windows icons with ease. In order to make Windows 8/7/Vista icons compatible with Windows XP you can save them without any compression.
Vista Icons introduce a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows imagery. First, the style of Windows Aero-style icons is more realistic than illustrative, but not quite photorealistic. The icons are symbolic images - they should look better than photorealistic. Second, icons have a maximum size of 256 x 256, making them suitable for high-DPI displays. These high-resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons. Finally, wherever practical, fixed document icons are replaced by thumbnails of the content, making documents easier to identify and find. Thus, ArtIcons is a beeline to refining the visuals of your program and making it more communicative for users.
A picture of a maximum size of 256 x 256 to be used as an icon, in principle, is supported by XP, yet such an icon occupies 400Kb of disk space, which is far more than standard 25Kb of an XP icon. Aha-Soft has again found a way to cast off these shackles: ArtIcons uses advanced PNG compression to save images without losses and supports semitransparent images with 8bit alpha channel. That technology reduces the size of an icon only, leaving the quality invariable.
ArtIcons will help you to obtain the modern Windows 7 look. All you need is just to redesign your program's most prominent icons to use the Aero-style. From this time onwards Vista Icons crafted by ArtIcons will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. ArtIcons will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.