What [graphics editing] programs do you use?

[Dagoth]

Alot of spriters have different methods of creating their sprites. So it crossed my mind to wonder what other spriters use.

I triend GIMP, but the interface was too big, so I settled for icoFX, and I like the program. Easy to use, supports transparency, and can export as icons or other types of images, such as .bmp, .gif, etc. but thats me; what about all other spriters? This question goes out to those portrait makers oout there (the ones with the bright blue names and such. )

Clarified thread title a little.
-- shadowmaster

[artisticdude]

Adobe Photoshop 8, Paintbrush, GIMP, Artrage Deluxe. Mainly Photoshop. It has a simple, intuitive interface and powerful features, such as transparency, layers, a large range of export/import formats, and a wide selection of tools and tool settings. It's a bit steep as far as price goes, but it is a great program and runs natively on mac and windows (possibly lunix, although I can't remember for sure). I tried Pixen, but it's basically a simplified version of Photoshop.

[Dagoth]

Artrage is a new name to me, but I recognize the others. Adobe seemed hard to master, but its easy to use once you experiment with it.

[Dixie]

Well, I just started delving in the spriting world, so I might not be very much use. I'm on a mac, so I use Sea Shore, although it lacks many fonctionnalaties in my opinion, and I don't really like it. Some years ago, back when mac wasn,t in my world, I worked RPG Maker sprites with a program called charamaker. Ok, it's pretty archaic and maybe not so flexible/polyvalent, but I really miss that program and many of its fonctonalities, and can't make it run on my mac. *sigh*

If anybody has other suggestions for spriting on the mac!... I tried pixen but couldn't make it work at all, it would just not launch.

[artisticdude]

Try paintbrush. It's basically a mac clone of MS paint, so it lacks the transparency feature that Adobe Photoshop, Gimp (and Pixen? I can't remember) have. But Paintbrush is a clean program, with all the basic tools, and it can save to the .png format. And best of all, it's free.

[Blarumyrran]

Windows 3.1 also had "paintbrush", a precursor to Paint but had some cool things Paint doesn't (different dither-like pattern fills!). Who stole from who?

[Zerovirus]

I use MS Paint.

You guys are way too fancy. Blarumyrran repeatedly laughs at me for this, but all I need is line, bucketfill, magnifier, and eraser. What do you want all this other stuff for? Anything a program or script can do in pixelart I can do by hand with the line tool.

[Blarumyrran]

And really, what do you need even Paint for? Why not just read the w3c png reference and make whole pngs in a hex editor from scratch.

[artisticdude]

You guys are way too fancy.

Thing is, I'm on a mac, so MS paint isn't available, and I don't want to spend $180+ on the necessary software in order to get MS paint. Adobe Photoshop runs natively on Mac, has transparency built in (plus it allows you to chose the percentage level of transparency, which=easy shadows), and has numerous other tools that I find very useful, especially point-select, which allows you to select an irregularly-shaped area of pixels. Photoshop also handles layers, which is great for spriting and portraits (the latter especially, although I'm not into that sort of thing). And it opens multiple images at a time -all in the same window- which is great for reference/palette stealing. Perhaps there are better graphic applications out there, but I'm fine with Photoshop, even if it did nearly bankrupt me to obtain it.

[Cloud]

I use GIMP 2.4, I've tried 2.6 and I don't like what they've done with the floating of menus above the images as alt+tabbing between an image and something like the Layers dock is ingrained. I like to have a clear screen and because I'm on a Microsoft OS I'd need another monitor for that (or have no docks open, which is just as bad).

[doofus-01]

I use GIMP 2.4 as well. It may not be the best thing out there, but it works.

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.

For larger stuff: get rid of the hard edge on the eraser, use paintbrush instead of pencil (reduce opacity sometimes too), and bring back anti-aliasing on select tool. There are a lot of filters and all, but I don't think it's really possible to make something look good with all that stuff if you can't at least get some mileage out of regular paintbrush. Except Gaussian Blur filter, that just makes everything look great.

[Spell]

I use GIMP since years although I am not really happy with it, since it's lacking innovation and the development is just to slowgoing for me. I am looking forward to see what Krita will become in the near future.

Disregarding from my selfish software preferences GIMP is quite nice for pixel-art. You can quickly draw some sillouhetes, overdraw it with pixels and pick up colors with Ctrl+Click. (If you ask me GIMP is only good for Pixel-Art and post production from images. In any other things it's just very unproductive.)

[Telaron]

There are various opinions about what program is the best for spriting. I use Adobe Photoshop 8 and it works great! I know a lot of people use GIMP also. There are many other paint programs that you can use, but none are as good as GIMP or Photoshop in my opinion. If you'rr doing spriting, I would definitely go with either GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.

[Dagoth]

I use MS Paint.

You guys are way too fancy. Blarumyrran repeatedly laughs at me for this, but all I need is line, bucketfill, magnifier, and eraser.

Well I am not judging, but MS paint was out for at least 12 years, and does not save transparency unless you modify the program or something. How exactly do you do this?

[Zerovirus]

My answer? Screw transparency. It's not like I make my sprites just to be put in the game or whatever.