Icons may be displayed in several sizes or color depths. In many cases, an icon rendered in 256x256 would not look nice in 16x16, because, in such small sizes, the dropped shadow only disturbs the user and the perspective makes objects unrecognizable. Thus, the icon image must be designed in several image formats. An image format has two main properties which distinguish it from other image formats:
An icon should have the following image formats to look nice everywhere:
Tip: Using 256 colors instead of 24-bit RGB reduces the icon file size and does not present a significant difference to the human eye.
Tip: If you want your icon to be used at the corner of the title bar of XP(tm) windows, you can create a 20x20 @ 32-bit icon format. This is the size in which the title bar-icons are rendered. If you do not provide a 20x20 icon, and the 16x16 format is picked by the OS for this purpose, it may look a bit blurred.
You can find menu items related to image formats in the Icon menu. These including creating, deleting, converting and moving image formats. These can be also reached by right-clicking the format list box of a document window.
To paste the copied image as a new image format, choose Edit | Paste as New Format or press Shift+Ctrl+V.