Icons can have and usually have transparent regions. You may say that their background is transparent and you can see the real background (for example your Desktop wallpaper) behind the icon.
This guide will show you how to prepare your images before conversion to icons to make the background of the icons transparent and allow the real background to show itself. If you only have an .ico file instead of an original picture, the problem is a much harder, but the instructions stay the same. In case of a small .ico file, you will not be able to hide inaccuracies in the resizing process and added shadow; also, there are no explicit eraser tools in the icon layout, you'll have to switch to the transparent color manually.
The image on the right demonstrates the difference that can be achieved when background is removed from an image before it is converted to icon.
To obtain the lower icon, the unwanted regions must be manually erased. The process is not hard, but it may be time consuming if the background and foreground are not easily separated.
Start by opening the source image in RealWorld Icon Editor and crop it to the region with the object of interest (use the transformation tool, select region, right-click and pick Crop to selection from context menu). The picture used in this example is already cropped.
Then use the Eraser tools (the 3 tools with chequered icons) to erase portions of the background:
that of the helps regions, rectangles, or individual pixels.
The larger your source image the better. Erasing will never be 100% accurate, because there is some color blend in every photo. If your image is large enough, the inaccuracies will not be visible after conversion to icon. You can see that the shadow effect (added automatically during conversion to icon) nicely compensated the background pixels left in the picture due to the dog's fur.
The process of removing background can be very fast if the source picture contains for example a human in front of a solid-color wall (simply use the floodfill eraser on the wall) or it can be more complicated as in our case, where the fur complicates the process and it will take you a couple of minutes to finish the work.
Once you have the background removed, you can convert the image to icon. Before you do that, consider removing the empty background to maximize the size of the object on the picture. It may be also useful to adjust brightness and contrast.
How to make icons from photographs
Anonymous
on November 8th 2012
I can make this into an icon but it has a white background even though the image is a png, how can i get rid of the white background? I have the same issue.. my icons have a white background and are coming from PNGS help i have a deadline at work...
.png is not a silver bullet, it merely allows transparent pixels to be in an image, but it is up to the person, who made the .png to actually make some regions transparent
Anonymous
on October 16th 2014
excellent!
Anonymous
on December 17th 2014
nice, i need it! thanks 
gloryinx
registered user
on August 17th 2015
THANKS FOR YOUR EXPERIENCE
Anonymous
on November 13th 2015
ok have an icon (WITH wording) in the png format ...but has a black background.....how do I make the whole icon transparent?...can I? ...I am looking for that so after its saved..it will go over anything....am I at the right place ....lol ...thanx
Anonymous
on March 5th 2016
Great product used it very successfully,thank you
Anonymous
on January 3rd 2018
thanks
Anonymous
on August 10th 2020
bruh
Anonymous
on January 26th 2021
Ok
Anonymous
