Making transparent .xpm icons

Or cutting out pixels without using scissors

As part of recent project to design icons for a software application, we were required to save the icons as .xpm files. A minor task we thought, until we discovered that Photoshop does not support this file format as standard.

We found a number of solutions, but ran into various problems, particularly with transparency.

1Place the icon in a new Photoshop file with a transparent background, and save as an RGB .png file.

2In the Layers palette, hold down the 'command key' and click on the layer that contains the icon. This creates a selection of the icon. Save the selection as a channel.

3Copy the channel into a new Photoshop file and save as a grayscale .png file.

Since Photoshop doesn't save xpm formats, I took the easy option and gave the files to David to work on!