Is there a best of bread app for this; the one that most icon desingers use? Thanks.
I believe Adam Betts does most of his work in Photoshop and Illustrator. And he does amazing work.
And here is a good tutorial on making “aqua” icons in Photoshop. http://www.iheartny.com/howto_01.html
Photoshop & Iconfactory’s Iconbuilder plugin.
http://iconfactory.com/software/iconbuilder
I use Illustrator for the most part – lots of flexibility, though it takes time to learn.
Photoshop is also great, but start at a large size as scaling up will drop the quality (unlike scaling up in Illustrator which is vector based, so lossless).