"I Have Always Depended on the Kindness of Strangers"

[the_other_sandy]

...but I should probably start trying to learn to make my own icons. I don't want to do anything fancy with special effects, and I don't expect to be making enough of them to justify buying Photoshop or Paint Shop. Can IrfanView or GIMP be used to make icons? Do any of you use one or the other of them? Do you have a preference?


ETA: This is the icon referred to in comment 1.

Comments

[kb9vcn.livejournal.com]

I use GIMP once in awhile, and IrfanView just about every single day.

I made all but one of my own userpics. Out of those, I can only remember using GIMP for the one I used with this comment. I erased another character from the bottom right corner, and filled in the corner with solid green. Sloppy work, but good enough for 100x100.

If you only need to crop, resize, and maybe adjust colors and brightness, IrfanView works great, and it's very easy to use.

If you want to erase a background, or to combine two or more images in one single userpic, you'll probably need GIMP.

If you want to add text to your userpics, you might need something else. I find both GIMP and IV to be nearly useless for adding text. There might be something like a GIMP plug-in for text, but I find GIMP confusing and difficult enough to use just by itself.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

Thanks. If you think GIMP is confusing and difficult to work with, there's probably no hope for me.

I only want to crop and re-size, at least at the moment, so it sounds like IrfanView is good enough. Can it save images as .png?

[kb9vcn.livejournal.com]

The GIMP user interface is so confusing that someone actually wrote a plug-in called the GIMP Deweirdifier (http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=3892). You can't make this stuff up.

IrfanView can save to almost every image format ever invented, including PNGs. But JPEGs might give you smaller file sizes, even at 100% JPEG quality.