How to make your own mouse pointers
Introduction
I am going to make this process as easy as possible so we are going to cheat a little bit. Actually the following method will allow you to also make your own desktop icons at the same time since icons are what we will actually be making. The cheating is that we will just take a finished icon file (name.ICO) and rename it to work as a pointer (name.CUR). In reality there is no difference.
A few notes to start:- You will need a couple of free software packages.
- To build the actual icon/pointer we need to be able to save an image in a .CUR format. For this I recommend Irfanview.
Recommended download: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/irfanview.html
Main site: http://www.irfanview.com/ - In most cases you will want to have just a primary image not something with a full background. To achieve this a package to make everything except the primary image transparent. For this I recommend GIF Construction Set. There is a free and paid version. While the free version claims that after a trial period some functionality will be lost I have not seen this happen but I have been using the paid version for years so things may have changed.
http://www.mindworkshop.com/gifcon.html
- Definition of some terms:
- GIF Image: GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is just an image format that allows setting ONE color as transparent. Since only one color can be made transparent the entire area around the object that we want as a pointer MUST be the same color. The advantage of the GIF format over another (PNG) that also allows for a transparent color is that GIF images can be 'joined' together to make animations.
- Animated GIF image: This is a series of GIF images that are joined together to make an animated image. The animated Yoshi and Mario image in my post signature is a good example of this. Animated GIF images can also be turned into pointers. However it MUST be noted that there are two types of animated GIF images.
- A 'normal' animation: In this case every 'frame' of the animation is total intact and could be a static image by itself.
- A compressed animation: In this case only the first frame/image of the animation is totally complete. All following frames only include the changes involved with the animation. While this is great for an animation on a web site it will not work for our purpose.
- PNG Image: PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. If you prefer to work with PNG files you may feel free to do so but doing so will make following this tutorial a bit harder to follow as all the examples will be using GIF Images. The main disadvantage of using PNG images is that they do not allow for animation.
- ICON: This is a graphic item that is usually associated with a software package or link. The image at the left side of the address bar of this site is an icon. Since we will actually be creating icons that we will rename to be pointers you could use any finished image as a desktop icon for a shortcut.
- Mouse pointer/cursor: These are the graphic objects with which we basically control our computers. The standard arrow that moves around on your screen when you move your mouse is a mouse pointer/cursor.
Preparing your image
You are probably going to want to have only a specific object within your image show as your mouse pointer or icon. To accomplish this the rest of the image needs to be transparent. While not great for photo editing Windows Paint actually does a decent job of this. This is the only tedious part of the progress and will take the most time. If you have a package such as PhotoShop or PaintShop Pro you can use the functions within such packages to isolate the desired object. With Paint you would just draw over the background with a single color not included in the object that you want to keep. Since there are MANY packages that could be used I will not go into details as to this process. As the upper left hand corner will be the 'hot spot' that interacts with your screen you want the object very close to this corner. There are ways to change the hot spot but I want to keep this as simple as possible. Here is a sample of what you will want.
Attachment:
Backup of angl12.gif [ 4.33 KiB | Viewed 5539 times ]
Make it transparent
Here is where Gif Construction Set Professional comes in. Just load the prepared image and follow the instructions in the following capture and save the image.
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GCSP dialog.jpg [ 138.77 KiB | Viewed 5539 times ]
Here is the result. Notice that you can no longer see the green background. While there is still a little green around the image this will not be noticable.
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angl12.gif [ 4.53 KiB | Viewed 5539 times ]
Turn it in to a mouse pointer
Now we use Irfanview to transform the transparent GIF image into a mouse pointer. Just load the transparent GIF and then save as an .ICO (icon) file. Rename the .ICO file to a .CUR file and the job is done. Just go to your Mouse Properties then Pointers. Select the pointer that you want to change and Browse to where you saved your custom pointer and select. Click Apply and your new pointer is in action.
Attachment:
mouse settings.jpg [ 71.36 KiB | Viewed 5539 times ]
Download the mouse pointer made for this tutorial.
http://jaylach.com/downloads/angel-pointer.zip