Free Icon Editors

Are there any free(!ware) / opensource icon (.ico) editing programs? I've looked around and there are a few that will open/view icons, but haven't found a decent one for editing/manipulating objects in the .ico file. Ironically, I have Visual Studio, but even Microsoft admits their *own* software is not good enough to meet their *own* specifications:

Quote:

---

Microsoft Visual Studio doesn't support Windows Vista icons (there is no support for alpha channel or more than 256 colors)

---

.
So does anyone know of any good, free icon editing programs out there?

http://icofx.xhost.ro/

first result from googling, "Free Icon Editor" :)

http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/
This is a nice png to ico converter. You can use The Gimp to create alpha channelled png images and then just convert to ico.

I personally just search for an icon. There aren't but so many combinations with a 32 by 32 8-bit color icon. Most of the ones I need are already made. For those that aren't, I'd either use MS Paint or Inkspace and convert with Irfanview.

If you have photoshop, there are a few .ico plugins available like this one.

Cool, thanks guys. With all the abundant perspective/color pallette rules being defined for XP, Vista, KDE, Gnome, etc, it can be hard enough to design the icon, let alone having to hunt down a physical editor to create it in.
Also, I was wondering what you guys feel about using icon libraries? If you have the choice would you prefer to use someone else's which will be quicker and easier to use as well as may look better, or your own work/design, so that you can claim originality?

I like creating my own, mostly very simple and basic icons.

I like creating my own, too, but I use the Gimp so that they don't look too bad. :) The Gimp's gradients are amazing, and it has some nice plugins as well. Have you tried it? gimp.org

Yep, its alright and suprisingly good for GNU licensced, but I already am familiar with Photoshop so thats what I tend to use, only that, until now, I had no idea how to get an image from photoshop into .ico format without having to copy-paste it to VisualStudio first, so I would just end up designing it in VS, pixel-by-pixel, greulling work and highly unpleasing results to say the least... :S