Editing Current Mac OS X Icons

[nyi8bmzk]

Hey everyone, new to the forum.

I want to create a new icon set for my computer based off of the current OS X icons. But the .icns icon picture files are not compatible with photoshop to edit. Are there photoshop compatible versions of the icons located somewhere in the computer, or are there ways to convert the .icns files?

Thanks

[adrock42]

use icongrapher to edit the .icns

[nyi8bmzk]

Sorry if I sound noobish, but how come when you open a .icns file in Icongrapher are there multiple pictures? none of which look exactly like the icon does on the dock?

[ari79s]

Sorry if I sound noobish, but how come when you open a .icns file in Icongrapher are there multiple pictures? none of which look exactly like the icon does on the dock?

There are multiple pictures because the icon files (.icns) are scalable (16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 pixels) depending on how you are viewing them in finder, wether it be small icons in list view, medium or large icons in standard icon view or huge icons in coverflow. Maybe someone can explain that a little better but essentially all Mac icons are composed of several different sized images in order to look the best depending on how you are viewing them. In Iconographer the images my look different also because of masks.

 

You could try out Iconographer or just open the .icns files in Preview and drag one or all of the different sizes that appear next to the large image to your desktop as a tif file, which you can then edit in Photoshop. You could then use Apples Icon Composer (comes in the Developer Tools), the Photoshop plugin Icon Builder or several other methods to build/create the icns file with your new edited images. Sorry if that isn't too clear, maybe someone can do a better job or has a link to a nice page explaining it all.

 

You could try this little wiki to get some clearer info on it Apple Icon Image

Here are some free tools to help with some other aspects of creating icons OS X Icon Editor Pack