Скачать или смотреть Using images on items in VB (Paint+Photoshop required)

Okay so we have our application that we want to add the images all ready.
I have two buttons called "pp" and "m".
pp is used to Play/Pause a Directx song stream I created, and the "m" button mutes the audio. But this isn't about that, I want to create a play, pause, mute and unmute images for the application.

Start off in MSPaint, setting the image to about 6 pixels less than the button width/height to make sure none of it is cropped off. Draw single pixel lines for borders/outlines. Fill in maybe some basic color, nothing elaborate. Save as a PNG picture.

Open the PNG in Photoshop and copy the "background" layer to a new layer, then delete the old locked layer. We do this so we can leave blank or "transparent" pixels where we don't want anything to be. Click the MagicWand tool and turn AntiAliasing OFF. (Or leave it on if you wish...) Set the color tolerance to one so you can select just one color then delete what you want to see through (in the example, I select white). Next I will select the black outline with Contiguous unticked so I can select all black in the picture. I copy this border to a new layer, then I continue. Now we can make the layer look more "new" by adding a gradient overlay which sets a change of one color to another at a given angle. I am keeping the angle at 90 degrees for an up-down gradient, and I am setting the blend mode to multiply so i can see through the white on the black/white gradient. Looks kinda nice right? I'll do something similar on the border also... I'll add some bevel and emboss for a little image enhancement, and save as PNG again.

Put the images into the directory of your application (don't embed them because the application saves them within itself as bitmaps, thus the application file size explodes after adding a few images). Go to your VS project (VS2008 & VS2010 compatible code!) and double click the form to get to MyBase.Load. My button already exists, so I'll just type:
{CODE}
pp.image = Image.FromFile(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\util\pause.png")
{/CODE}
What this means is to load the image from a file "pause.png" in a sub directory called "util" where-ever my application is. Now when I build the app and run it, it shows up!

Rate and comment, my viewers!