Creating high rez .ico's for free in vista? Possible?

If anyone has anyway to create .ico's that aren't pixelated please share. Trust me I have been up and down google and most every other search engine looking for free trials and the like. Found quite a few but none that can create, clear, unpixelated, images. It must be possible because the icons on your desktop aren't pixelated. =/

 

Have you tried XnView and its convert function?

 

Have you looked at these?

 

Icons Archive is good as stated above.

In any rate my advice is to create one yourself. Or get a 256x256 image and have it converted in IcoFX. I have created alot of 256x256 .ico icons all the time for my buddies and some for my files and folders, rocketdock and etc.

Try it, its free and easy to use. Albeit like photoshop.

http://icofx.ro/

 

Well, make sure your source images are big enough; I think Vista icons have a max size of 256px, but of course you don't have to view them that big. Ideally, the .ico's for Vista (and XP... etc) have multiple sizes contained within them, so no (or little?) scaling is required.
Anyway, all that too say, I know GIMP can do it, but it's kind of labor intensive, scaling the images to the proper sizes in their own layers and all that. Seems like there out to be something out there that will do it easily and for free... maybe archer7's suggestion ^^^ will work.

Edit: Ooops... some people posted while I was writing. Pay attention to them.

 

I use Photoshop. There's a plugin that allows you to save as .ico files, so you can use them as icons. If you're interested, I can look for the plugin for you.

 

You don't have to use all of the allowable sizes... you can just save a .ico with only 256x256 if you want to.

One option is to use an online image file format converter like this one to create the .ico file from a .png image file.

If you don't want any pixelation, then use a 256x256 source image.

EDIT: I should've mentioned the 256x256 resolution applies to Vista, not XP.

Also, that's fine for an icon to associate with a shortcut or something, but if you are creating an application, you will want to include the lower-res icon bitmaps in the .ico file as well. (The .ico format can hold a bunch of different bitmaps for different sizes.) In that case, I suggest using an icon editor program.

 

I am. Quite actually. I was wishing photoshop had something like that. Thank you in advance.

 

googled it. found it. + rep for the tip anyway =D

 

What's the plugin?

I found one but it could only do 32x32 or something like that...

Cheers

 

I presume this is the right one, I've just uploaded it from my photoshop plugins folder. click I created a 256x256 image and was able to save it as an icons, so hopefully that will work for you.