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Description

"Create 32bit smooth alpha-blended icons with smooth edges in various sizes"

The concept of resampling an image and using an alpha channel to feather the edges is described in the Alpha-DIB section article Alpha Resampling. The idea is that you start with a single, pixel accurate bitmap of a much larger size to the image you want to draw. Then you assign the background colour of the bitmap as the "transparent" colour. This colour is then mapped so that in the destination image it has an alpha value of 0, i.e. the destination Pixels are completely transparent. Then say you want to create a version of the image that is 1/4 of the size. Each pixel in the smaller version of the image corresponds to 16 pixels (4 x 4) in the source image. Then, rather than just averaging the colours in each of the source pixels to create the output pixel, you take both the colour average for non-transparent pixels and the average overall alpha of the 16 pixel cell. The result is then the colour average with the overall alpha applied. This means that a 4 x 4 block that is half filled with black pixels will result in a single black pixel in the output with 50% transparency, and as a consequence the sampled-down image looks much smoother to the eye.
Icons are internally stored in Windows as DIBSections, as described in the cFileIcon article. The main difference Between an icon and a standard Windows bitmap are two fold:
1. An icon can store multiple renderings within the same file structure, with different sizes and colour depths. These are called Device Images.
2. Each icon Device Image contains two DIB Sections: the image (which is just the image bitmap) and the Mask. The Mask is a monochrome DIBSection (i.e. it uses just 1 bit for each pixel) in which the pixels are 'white' (1) were the icon should be transparent otherwise they are 'black' (0). you can free download Alpha Icon Creator 1.0 now.

Keywords

icon creater, alpha, c creator, icon creator

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  Create 32bit smooth alpha-blended icons with smooth edges in various sizes
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  Create 32bit smooth alpha-blended icons with smooth edges in various sizes