RealWorld Icon Editor is really four programs: a photo editor, a 3D modeler, a picture creator, and a tool to make static icons from the images you create. The icon-creating tool generates a variety of sizes from 16 pixels square to 256 pixels square and allows you to save a variety of formats optimizing your image as an icon, avatar, or favicon for either PC or Mac.

Turning a photo into an image suitable for an icon will be familiar to anyone who's used an photo editor. Open any .jpg, .tif, .psd, .gif, .png, or .bmp file in RealWorld Icon Editor and crop, resize, touch-up, and paint over the image using paintbrush, eraser, and fill tools. You can also add stock images, backgrounds, and textures from an included library of royalty-free graphics and dingbats, or just add text and draw freehand.

Icon Editor will save the adapted image as a .jpg, .bmp, or .png at your original resolution, however large, meaning that you don't need a separate graphic design program to match your icons, avatars, favicons, and even logos and other art in your Web and print branding. Once you have your basic design saved in its native format, one button click will send it to the next step: transforming it into multiple icons, avatars, or favicons.

The 3D design tools reside at the steep end of the learning curve. RealWorld Icon Editor allows you to create simple 3D objects from preformed geometric shapes--arrow, box, cone, cylinder, prism, pyramid, sphere, slope, tank, tetrahedron, or torus--or text, to which you can add drop shadows, tweak, stretch, rotate, and change the light source. In addition, Icon Editor can take an existing 3D model, allowing you to define and save snapshots with custom camera and lighting parameters.

If you're new to 3D design and modeling, this aspect of RealWorld Icon Editor can be intimidating. But you don't need to know an extrusion surface from a surface of revolution, for instance, unless you are trying to create a very specific design. Getting the desired effect may come down to watching a video tutorial and then spinning, flipping, and stretching until the object looks right.

You can continue to tweak your image after saving it as an avatar, icon, or favicon. Add a projected shadow or drop shadow, sharpen your image, even add text. In addition, RealWorld adds two utilities that make Icon Editor exceptional: the ability to independently tweak different sized icons starting from the same image, and a perpetual preview--essential for making sure your tiny favicon works just as well as your avatar or your original file.

Icon Editor doesn't make animated icons, which is a little disappointing, and its $47 pricetag is on the high side for a simple icon editor. Picture To Icon costs $40, and Icon Office $30. However, considering Icon Editor's features that these other programs lack--including 3D modeling, high res-image editing, and photo editing tools--if you need a program to create cross-branded and various format icons and other images, this is the one to use.

Batch operation, the only feature that is included exclusively in the $89 professional version of Icon Editor, can create icons from images; convert icons from windows to Mac format and vice versa; extract images from icons; create previews of icons; extract icons; and perform user-defined custom operations. If you need to batch process any of these, it's worth the upgrade.

Regardless of your experience, RealWorld Icon Editor can help you create professional-looking graphics with a bit of effort and minimal cost.

Note: This software comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This is the 32-bit version. If your 64-bit PC is running a 64-bit OS, please download the 64-bit version instead.

--Clare Brandt