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32-bit Windows cursor images

Update (13th April 2012)

Photoshop 7 is in fact perfectly capable of replicating the shadow: sample Photoshop document. This second attempt took only a few minutes to set up a drop shadow based solely on glancing at the real cursor held over another window. The only difference was a single percentage point of opacity. For reference, the shadow settings are:

When taking a screenshot of Windows, the cursor is never included, which can be detrimental to your objective. Some screenshot tools will fake the cursor afterwards, but they never add the cursor shadow. I can’t find any screenshot tool that will draw a real or realistic cursor shadow, and the drop shadow effect cannot be replicated in Photoshop 7.

There are also cursors, such as the drag and drop cursors, that never appear in any screenshots at all, no matter what tool you use.

Thus, I was forced to do it the hard way: install the free Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft, install Windows 2000 afresh under virtualisation, and take screenshots of Virtual PC to capture the cursors. Then, I used Photoshop to transfer the shadow from the image to the layer mask to create a 32-bit image with the original shadow, making the image 100% authentic.

The cursor images are likely copyright Microsoft Corporation, and as such I impose no copyright restrictions. Use as you see fit. Each cursor is available as a 32-bit PNG and as a Photoshop document.

For now, I have only produced some basic, common cursors. If you need another 24-bit or lower cursor converting, just ask.

Cursor Format
Arrow, Vista Aero PNG PSD
Arrow, white PNG PSD
Arrow, black PNG PSD
Arrow, 3D grey PNG PSD
Arrow, 3D grey PNG PSD
Hourglass, white PNG PSD
Working in background, white PNG PSD
Drag and drop: move PNG PSD
Drag and drop: copy PNG PSD

I added the Vista Aero cursor at Shinaku’s suggestion, taken from a Softpedia screenshot of Vista on Vista in Virtual PC and tweaked to remove the grey background, augmented with the help of Alan Le’s Vista cursors for XP. Although it’s a 32-bit cursor, it’s effectively indistinguishable from the real thing, but I am not doing that again.