Jan 27, '04 10:49:00AM • Contributed by: EatingPie
Most 2-D Icons are so ... well ... blah. Especially those created from animated characters, almost always masked, but flat as the proverbial pancake. Blah. Creating a drop shadow requires only two steps, and a pair of free utilities: Iconverter (source available) and Pic2Icon.
First, fire up Iconverter. Deselect "Use file Contents" and choose "File Format: Tiff" (which has transparency). Then you simply drag and drop your icon (or folder full of them) into Iconverter's Dock icon. Boom! You now have a tiff.
Step two, fire up Pic2Icon. In "Anti-Aliasing," I check "high" for best results. In Settings, check "Create drop shadow" for the magic. You can drag and drop one or more of your Tiffs onto Pic2Icon, and since it's smart enough to handle the transparency, it creates a nice 3-D drop shadow around your new icon. Plus the icon lands on the Tiff, so no extra cutting/pasting either. More subtle than drastic (as seen in the screenshot at left), but still ... no more blah!
