What Program to use for Pixel Art? (Paid and Free Software)

what software should use to make pixel art well the answer is probably just a sprite hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out the tiny squares in both small I'm for fun primarily using Adobe Photoshop and there's lots of programs out there that can make pixel art I mean we're just talking about putting in small squares onto a canvas so there's tons of options but in this video we're just gonna go through some of the best ones for software you have to pay for stuff that's free and if you don't want to commit to like downloading the program there's lots of free him or if there's a couple three like online browser tools you can use as well so we'll cover that so let's go take a look if you go searching for pixel art programs you'll quickly find there's actually lots of options out there in fact when I was doing research for this video I found upwards of 25 different programs recommended through various sources so for this video of X you just pulled the top 12 most frequently referenced programs for us to consider and to be clear I have tried a lot of these but I do my work primarily in Adobe Photoshop because it's the one that I'm most fluent in so first let's start with the programs that you have to pay for a sprite is $15 American and it's a program dedicated to pixel art specifically it's one of those programs you hear about the most when you're looking for what to use and for good reason it's clear that the developer not only wants to provide a simple and intuitive tool for making pixel art but they also have a deep appreciation for the art form itself this is seen right down to the fun pixel art style of the user interface as well as the wide set of pixel specific features that are useful for beginners and advanced users alike one of my favorite features is how the program comes preloaded with a bunch of popular pixel art color palettes like Pico eight and EDG 32 as well as some gaming palettes like the Gameboy and NES there's also an option to enable pixel perfect drawing which helps create cleaner lines and curves to avoid dropping down extra overlapping pixels sometimes referred to as doubles and there's an easy way to perfectly resize your artwork for posting online the other great feature of a sprite is the easy to use timeline tool that organizes your layers against the timeline of the frame animation providing an easy interface to plan of animated work if you're just starting out with pixel art you might not even be thinking about animated work right away but just know that it's a nice feature that's there to be ready when you are overall this program is very user friendly and it's widely used so there's plenty of information and tutorials available online and if you want to try it out there's actually a free trial version but just know that it doesn't let you save your work next we move on to pixel edit which is only nine dollars and like a sprite it's another program dedicated solely to pixel art the main difference you'll find what pixel edit though is that it's mainly geared towards pixel art tilework liked for designing repeating tile game graphics in fact when you first start up a new file it primarily asks you how many tiles wide and tall you'd like your document to be where you can define the single tile dimension or just have it default to 16 by 16 pixels per tile that being said you can define a full size document in pixels and just get to work on a full artwork just like the other programs with control over individual layers there's great color selection tools and there's also a few preset color palettes albeit a smaller selection than a sprite and there's also a pixel perfect drawing tool called clean one-line pixel in this program but pixel edit really shines if you plan on making an organizing game development work such as planning out world maps and town maps from our series of tile designs you can define and save tile designs edit them rotate them and stamp them out on the document the animation tool also organizes your workflow as a tiled cheap which is great for having an overview of the full animation but with the focus on tiling it probably works best for animated game design assets rather than creating a standalone animated artwork still this program should be of interest to you if you want to create pixel art images and mock-up game designs in an efficient manner and for only $9 it's not really going to break the bank for what it can offer next we come to promotion ng at a cost of $39 this is yet another pixel dedicated program and it markets itself towards those interested in an all-in-one graphical editor for pixel art mobile and handheld games it includes features like animation tile mapping uneasy anti-aliasing tool and color manipulation that even lets you work within the restraints of actual gaming hardware this allows for easy integration of the assets into game making engines like unity and game maker there's a free version available with lower functionality if you want to give it a try before buying I haven't tried it because I use a MacBook and it's made primarily for Windows though from what I've read the learning curve is steeper than programs like a sprite and pixel edit but if you're serious about getting into game development of pixel art games it looks like it'd be worth doing some research into it's apparently in use by professional industry studios like half brick Ubisoft and way forward so that's cool as well and lastly for the paid programs we've got Adobe Photoshop which is the program that I use to make pixel art it's of course a highly functional image editor but it works really well for pixel art if you just open a small canvas and use the pencil tool combined with robust selection tools color blending modes and a frame animation timeline tool it's really got everything you need for making pixel art I even used it to make the materials for these YouTube videos now here's the thing I've been using Photoshop for about 12 years so it was a no-brainer for me when I started pixel art about five years ago to just go with this program however would I recommend it to someone who's just looking for a program solely for the purpose of making pixel art probably not mostly because of the price these days Adobe uses a subscription model and the cheapest package of the includes Photoshop will cost you ten dollars a month I was lucky enough to purchase my copy of Photoshop cs6 back in 2015 for about four hundred and seventy dollars so it's an older version but I don't have a subscription and I definitely plan on writing that purchase out till the wheels fall off so the bottom line is if you're looking to pick this one up just for pixel art it might be a bit overkill and really who's got room for another subscription service these days but hey you know maybe if you're sitting more than just pixel art and you also need something to handle photography or other graphic projects this could be worth considering too but what if I told you that there's a pretty good alternative to Photoshop that's available at a much cheaper price and in fact that the cheaper price is that it's free that's right let's move over to our list of free software and see that one of the top of the goofy-looking weasel sort of character that's a program called and it's an open-source image editing software often hailed as the best free alternative to Adobe Photoshop and since it's free I decided to just download it and I was surprised that I felt quite at home in its interface and it's got an astonishing amount of functionality to mimic that of Photoshop as well there's even advanced filters and layer blending modes another cool thing I found was that there's options for customizing the brush settings like even when you're working with a pencil tool for pixel art you can easily adjust the size aspect ratio and the angle of the brush from a menu on the side I'm not really sure how often this would actually come in handy for pixel work but it kind of caught my eye nonetheless so yeah I'd highly recommend this program if you're interested in a free alternative to photoshop the only downside I can see related to pixel art is that there's not really a convenient functionality for creating animated work here there is an animated option but I could only get it to play through my artwork layers in sequence rather than letting me establish my own layer changes within a timeline I mean you could just set up your layers as an animation frame by frame but that would be a bit more of a painstaking effort to achieve something that should be much easier but who knows they could end up adding some more animation function in the future other free image editing programs include Krita and paint.net Krita is mainly designed for digital illustration work on tablets like there's a variety of brush and texture features for doing work like concept art and comics but you can slap in that good old 1 pixel brush and just use it for pixel art if you wish next graphic scale is a free pixel art tool that can be used on windows and it looks to be good for character sprite in animation work although I've heard that it doesn't have an eraser tool which is kind of strange but I think you can paint in the background color and it ends up getting set to transparency if that makes sense either way it's useful pixel editor it's free and there's enough users out there that you should be able to find a few good tutorials online to get started graphics 2 is a bitmap paint program that lets you use up to 256 colors and have multiple artwork layers it's even got some very basic frame animation function one of the things that I have in my notes is that it was like a tribute to mspaint on steroids whatever I meant by that so take that for what you will in some ways though it's a very pure pixel editor so it might be fun to create something within the restriction of that program depending on what your objectives are for your work similarly Pico pixel is a pixel editor just for the Mac again this one has pretty basic function sort of like that of mspaint but it lets you choose colors and drop squares onto a canvas so in theory that could be all you need to get going if you want something simple and or on a Mac lastly if you don't want to download any software at all there are a couple free online tools you can use to create pixel art right within your web browser Pisco lets you sizes of canvas and gives you a central drawing capabilities like a pencil tool color picker and shape tools you can add layers flip the canvas around and create animations on an easy-to-use timeline the final result can be exported as a PNG image a gif or a sprite sheet it's kind of perfect if you just want to start messing around pixel art this very minute no strings attached similarly there's the low spec pixel editor there's less functionality here than with Pisco in fact you're really just able to select colors and use a pencil tool on a canvas and an eraser in that but what's great about low spec is their library of color palettes that can be referenced regardless of the pixel editor low spec is just a neat site to browse if you're looking for interesting color combos there's even a page that aggregates pixel art tutorials so it's definitely worth checking out regardless of what software you end up using all right so that's partly a lot of information so let's just do kind of a quick summary round up maybe like let's do it Awards the hell I guess I don't know and this will just be my own opinions here I consider myself too be a pixel art hobbyist not really like a game designer so we'll consider the software option here from the perspective of an aspiring pixel art hobbyist for the best paid option I'm gonna give it to a sprite with the intuitive UI and simple animation tool you'll probably just hit the ground running and not have a steep learning curve as with other software and it's very popular so there's lots of info and tutorials already available the honorable mention here goes to pixel edit of course for it's really cool tile functions and for the best free option I'll give it to graphic scale it's a free program that's designed for making pixel art including some nice animation features things to keep in mind are that it's only for Windows and that the workflow through the interface may have a few quirky learning curve items such as the lack of an eraser as a runner-up I'll suggest p.m. which does have exceptional functionality close to that of Adobe Photoshop but the bare-bones animation function means you'll have a tough time if you want to create animated work and while I'm on a roll here let's also do best free online tool that's of course just gonna be pistol I had fun messing around on there and it's kind of perfect if you just want to dip a toe into the waters of pixel art without having to get any software at all okay I hope that helped answer the question about what software to use to make pixel art or at least give you some ideas about the options out there in case you were looking just to upgrade from ms paint or something like that so thanks for watching and if anyone out there is tried any of these programs or maybe some that I didn't mention at all feel free to leave your feedback about what you like about that software and maybe what some of the shortcomings are could help people that are still deciding on what they want to use so thanks again for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 770,672

Keywords: pixel art, program, software, tutorial, aseprite, best pixel art program, free

Id: 90BghUX7SD0

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019