What [graphics editing] programs do you use?

[Hulavuta]

Yeah, I use paint too. I only use GIMP for transparency and for adding explosions and laser beams.

[Dixie]

Yeah, I knew about paintbrush for mac, but I tend to think it's not as performing as paint on certain matters. The select and copy/paste fonctions are a bit weird, for instance. Plus, the transparency. I can't easily draw a sprite and then transfer it to seashore to put the transparency, because seashore's bucketfill tool has issues (maybe just with transparency, but hey, that's precisely what I'd want).

Other things I dislike about seashore:
No grid;
No line tool;
Bucketfill misworks;
And a feature the aforementionned charamaker had: right clic fonctionned like a colour selector. You could just right clic any pixel and you you would use its colour. Saved tons on going to and from the menu to selct the specific tool (plus the hotkeys don't work exactly properly, or some are missing, or something like that).

Well, anyway, I hate seashore but I still use it from lack of my program of choice for mac...

[Blarumyrran]

For sprites, all you need are hard-edged eraser, select tool (sans anti-aliasing), colour picker, and pencil. Layers are nice for shadows and possibly team-colouring.

Other things occasionally useful for pixelart

• indexing to manually made palette
• indexing to palette made automatically for n colors
• flip
• magic wand (with lots of settings, eg picking by hue or by saturation or lightness, or combo etc)
• a display of number of pixels in selected region
• grid, as said (configuring & displaying & snapping to it, incl setting offset)
• selecting all pixels with transparency between 0 and 100 (can be done in gimp through masks, which is a bit annoying)
• saving indexed png with arbitrary palette
• contrast sliders
• HSL sliders
• HSV sliders (the only thing of these not in gimp)
• other stuff I can't remember right now

that is not to speak of animation stuff

[doofus-01]

For sprites, all you need are hard-edged eraser, select tool (sans anti-aliasing), colour picker, and pencil. Layers are nice for shadows and possibly team-colouring.

Other things occasionally useful for pixelart

• indexing to manually made palette
• indexing to palette made automatically for n colors
• flip
• magic wand (with lots of settings, eg picking by hue or by saturation or lightness, or combo etc)
• a display of number of pixels in selected region
• grid, as said (configuring & displaying & snapping to it, incl setting offset)
• selecting all pixels with transparency between 0 and 100 (can be done in gimp through masks, which is a bit annoying)
• saving indexed png with arbitrary palette
• contrast sliders
• HSL sliders
• HSV sliders (the only thing of these not in gimp)
• other stuff I can't remember right now

that is not to speak of animation stuff

I'm not sure if that's a refutation... Those things are probably nice to have, but that is a big list and I don't think you need them. I don't use most of those, and I don't think my failings are related to my not using them.

[SpoOkyMagician]

I agree with zerovirus. MS Paint is all you really need. (Unless you wanna do transparency. I rarely use that myself; unless I am dealing with wesnoth images. In that case, I'd use GIMP to add the transparency.) I rarely use the layers in GIMP anyhow so I don't see the need.

edit: I REALLY need to edit/fix my avatar later... Just too lazy...

[Icarusvogel]

Paint.Net and Gimp here, but I'm still learning Gimp.

[Nibbio]

Gimp, OpenCanvas and Inkscape are all the graphics programs that are installed on my pc ^^

[sur.nhm]

GIMP (though I'm not much of an artist)...

[Jetrel]

I use photoshop. Mac users should note, there's an up-and-coming photoshop clone that's starting to get serious. http://www.pixelmator.com/ $60. It's not suitable yet for people who rely on a few esoteric photoshop features, especially some of the newer ones like the 3d canvas-mapping, but I'd say it's already on par with GIMP. The other big lack in pixelmator is non-destructive filters. Probably the biggest thing about pixelmator is that most of the UI is an extremely direct photoshop clone, so photoshop users can very easily adapt.

GIMP is a UI mess, and I'd rather not use it.

Other things occasionally useful for pixelart

• indexing to manually made palette
• indexing to palette made automatically for n colors
• flip
• magic wand (with lots of settings, eg picking by hue or by saturation or lightness, or combo etc)
• a display of number of pixels in selected region
• grid, as said (configuring & displaying & snapping to it, incl setting offset)
• selecting all pixels with transparency between 0 and 100 (can be done in gimp through masks, which is a bit annoying)
• saving indexed png with arbitrary palette
• contrast sliders
• HSL sliders
• HSV sliders (the only thing of these not in gimp)
• other stuff I can't remember right now

that is not to speak of animation stuff

I'm not sure if that's a refutation... Those things are probably nice to have, but that is a big list and I don't think you need them. I don't use most of those, and I don't think my failings are related to my not using them.

I agree entirely with this.

The assertion that you only need what's in MSPaint is true, unless you care about being fast. The above speeds stuff up dramatically (we're talking factors of ten, here).

Remember also - if quality is held constant, how fast you work is one of the primary limiting factors in how fast you learn, as well. Faster work, means more experiments, means you get better, quicker. I'd rather be good at art sooner in life. Especially given how short life is.

[thespaceinvader]

MM, MSPain(t) has all you need to pixel, true. But by no means does it have all you'd WANT. I would find pixelling immensely frustrating without, at the very least, layers. And tablet support.

[Frogger5]

Me too. In fact I really can't understand why people fancy paint. True it's all you need to make pixel art, but apart from that, what else? I just find it absolute rubbish compared to adobe or even pixen. I don't use GIMP cus I have photoshop so I have no idea what it's like.

I like pixen because unlike GIMP it is completely focused on pixel art. Its left and right mouse tools are EXTREMELY useful for getting colours going quicker. I have mine set up with the colour picker on the right button and line tool on left. That way it's simply a matter of right clicking on the colour I need and using it. I don't like pencil tools. I find them imprecise and they blot everywhere, which is annoying working with sprites because the blots turn out rather big. So I use line tool which is much cleaner and less frustrating.

The layers system is good but could use a bit of work. The animation is good but not great, and really destroys transparency and sometimes colour.
But if you want to get sprites done quickly and easily with little frustration, then pixen does the job perfectly.

[Mountain_King]

GIMP (though I'm not much of an artist)...

What he said.

[johndh]

GIMP is great for what I use it for (texturing), and the filters make life a lot easier, but I know nothing of spriting.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

A super-duper-unbelievably old version of photoshop elements. Not because I actually think it's better than anything else, but because I've never really taken the time to learn how to use anything else or get used to it, so I'm kind of stuck on Photoshop. (Which really isn't a bad thing)

[Feufochmar]

For pixel art, Kolourpaint, an equivalent of MsPaint for KDE (with a little more feature, for example 1 bit transparency). I use MyPaint when I try to do something with my tablet, and GIMP for the other things. I also use Inkscape for vector drawing. Krita (Koffice's GIMP) and Karbon14 (Koffice's Inkscape) are also installed on my computer, but I don't use them.