When searching for an utility to make or modify icons, what type of products will you look for? A fully featured image editing studio loaded with features, taking the entire DVD and with a price of over half a grand? Or a fast, compact free tool, downloads in seconds and is created for pixel-peeping?

If you're like most of us, you'll take the second choice. And you'll make the right choice. While it's possible to use Adobe Photoshop and alike to make icons, these tools were never meant for the task. Pixel-level graphics imposes its own requirements, and the choice of a right tool is essential for doing it right.

Junior Icon Editor at free-icon-editor.com is a free icon editor developed by Aha-Soft, a design company well-known for its numerous collections of ready-made icons. This is the tool they are constantly using in-house to make the smallest sizes like 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, where each pixel matters.

The free icon editor has everything you want to design, paint and modify low pixel count icons. Working with color depths of up to 8 bits per R, G, B channel (that's 24 bits in total), Junior Icon Editor offers full support for the separate 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, bringing the total available color depth of the image to 32 bits. Alpha channel is a dedicated layer defining a semi-transparent mask for the rest of the image. Depending on that mask, different parts of your image can be opaque, transparent, or semi-transparent. This innovative feature brings two important benefits to icons employing the Alpha channel. First, there will be no more jagged edges: your icons will always look smooth all around. Second, your icons will show smoothly with complex backgrounds including all kinds of colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are used in all systems including Windows Phone, Vista, Windows 7, Android, Blackberry and Apple iOS devices.

If you need support for terminal apps, Symbian OS or legacy systems, you can produce legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Talking of compatibility, the free icon editor can import and export icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR file formats. You can use icons in these formats on most desktop and mobile system in existence.

The free icon editor offers a number of handy tools to create and modify icons at pixel level. You can draw icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a number of geometric shapes such as circles, rectangles, lines and curves. You can change individual pixels with a sharpie. Existing icons can be rolled, rotated, shifted or mirrored. For 256-color images, you can pick or edit palette colors. True Color icons can use the entire gamut.

Junior Icon Editor is small and fast. Best of all, it's completely free. Download your copy of this free icon editor at sibcode.com.