Adobe Photoshop is one of the most advance tools in digital image editing and for developments as well such as icons and some other stuff.  Photoshop now is on CS5 which handles several new features and one is Content-Aware Fill where you can magically fill in spaces on digital images matching the tones, lightning and noise of the images making it as if it existed on the image.  You can find more of the new features on their site.

Photoshop has indeed grown to be a powerful tool but one thing I noticed without it is saving a .ico file out of the images that we developing.  This made me search for plugins and happy to say that I found one and I want to share it to everyone because it is GNU licensed and free to share and download.  All you need to do is download the file and extract the files inside the zipped file, then copy the ICOFormat.8bi file and paste it on the file formats folder found inside your photoshop folder(C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Plug-Ins\File Formats).  You can now then save .ico files with your photoshop.