how to make icons more beautiful?

[sto]

look at this picture
http://upload.cs99.net/e.gif

i use the function SHGetFileInfo to get file icons. but these icons
are not very nice. there are some black things round of the icons.

many applications use system icons for files. how did their
programmers solve this problem in these apps?

 

[William Stacey [MVP]]

Most of the MS icons use the ~pinkish back color for the transparent color
(I think color 255,0,255). Then just set the transparent color property of
the control to the 255,0,255 color. You can replace the black here with
this color using paint program or you can try to set trans color to black to
remove the background black, but that is not good as most icons have some
black in them and you don't want that to disappear. I would grab new icons
that have to background color set to color above or change your icons to
match. HTH

--
William Stacey, MVP

look at this picture
http://upload.cs99.net/e.gif

i use the function SHGetFileInfo to get file icons. but these icons
are not very nice. there are some black things round of the icons.

many applications use system icons for files. how did their
programmers solve this problem in these apps?

 

[John Wood]

The trick is to use an application that supports 24bit color icons and an
alpha channel. Support for alpha channels in icons was only added relatively
recently and isn't supported by Visual Studio for a start (VS is pretty bad
for icon editing).

Alpha channels are important because it allows pixels to have a percentage
of opacity, so that its anti-aliased edges seamlessly merge into the
background.

My choice: use a vector app to create the icon (I use CorelDraw), that way
it's easy to edit it later and can easily be resized for differnt icon sizes
without any degredation. Export the vector to PNG with a transparent
background. Then import that into a good icon editor that supports alpha
channel icons and you should get a good result (I use Axialis, which also
supports 48 pixel icons).

Hope that helps.

look at this picture
http://upload.cs99.net/e.gif

i use the function SHGetFileInfo to get file icons. but these icons
are not very nice. there are some black things round of the icons.

many applications use system icons for files. how did their
programmers solve this problem in these apps?

 

[sto]

thanx very much

i found this.

http://www.vbaccelerator.com/home/N...etting_File_Icons_Using_The_Shell/article.asp


now file icons with alpha channels can be well displayed in my
program.

http://upload.cs99.net/e2.gif
[img:8d6e8602eb]http://upload.cs99.net/e3.gif[/img:8d6e8602eb]

i am reading their source code to understand how to solve this.