A primer on modifying application icons

Apr 30, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ecbtln

Are you tired of boring icons? Well, if you are, all you have to do is edit the icns file yourself. Now someone might say, how do I do that or how can I make an icon myself? But the truth is, you don't have to! All you have to do is modify the existing one to suit your needs with a picture editing program like Photoshop (and I bet there are others that are free). Here's how:

  1. Locate the application whose icon you'd like to change.
  2. Control-click on the application, pick Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, and navigate to Contents » Resources.
  3. Locate the icns file in the Resources folder controlling the Dock icon. It will usually be called the application_name.icns
  4. Hold Option while dragging the file to your local directory and out of the application folder. Holding Option will make a copy instead of moving the file.
  5. Open the file up in Preview and save the file as a png instead of icns; this allows Photoshop to be able to open it.
  6. Usually the only thing that needs to be done to make an icon look great and fun is just a change in color scheme (here are some examples), so open up the file in Photoshop (I'm using Elements 4), and navigate to Enhance » Adjust Color » Adjust Hue/Saturation (Command-U).
  7. Ignore the saturation and lightness, unless of course you don't want to. Drag the hue slider to your prefered setting.
  8. Save the file.
  9. Download a program like img2icns to convert the file back to icns.
  10. Once converted, drag the old icon file out of the Resources folder of the application, and drag in the new. Re-open the app, and you will see the new and improved icon.
A few tips: Always keep a backup of the old icon, especially with system apps that you cant just redownload. Don't go crazy on this, because one day you will wake up not liking any of the changes and have to go back to fix them all. Black and white are colors that do not change when changing the hue; keep that in mind when choosing what application icons you want to change.

[robg adds: This is a fairly basic hint, but for those new to OS X who wish to tweak their icons, it's a pretty good starter tutorial. Note that you can avoid the file conversion steps if you use some of the available OS X icon editors. A good list of icon tools for OS X can be found here; Iconographer is a full-blown icon editor, and very good at what it does.]

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