AuthorTopic: what is the best tool for pixelation?  (Read 25387 times)

Offline di0xygen

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #30 on: September 18, 2005, 01:11:05 am
every programs have the tools for pixelart, lets say that. pixelart need pixels and a color circle. and every programs got that.

when i look for a program, i look for hotkey and shortcut effectivness to add speed.

For instance, Corel Paintshop pro 9.
It has mousewheel zoom (which is ultra effective to move around a big image instead of using the scrollbars, and to zoom and dezoom fast)
Ctrl click eyedropper for fast and effective color grab. and its very useful when you make mistakes. combined with ctrl-Z its a deadly tool
it also export transparent gif and png.
And the color circle is wonderful cause it support luminosity hue and saturation wich is very effective when antialiasing a peice.

Offline Silver

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #31 on: September 18, 2005, 07:34:51 am
Hello there
My first program was ms paint it was nice but when i used paint shop pro 7.2 I improved in coloring and understand it
When Ill be so damn talent like helm / moonson / poting .  ill sure buy promotion .
 

Offline Razz

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #32 on: September 19, 2005, 12:18:43 am
IDraw3 is a great, great program. It's a bit less "complex" than Graphics Gale, but a bit more "complex" than MS Paint. It's comfortabley simple and pretty much better than MS Paint in every way. :)

Offline LuciferianSoul

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #33 on: September 19, 2005, 11:04:03 pm
I have Paint Shop Pro 9, but I don't like to use it for pixel art. It's too much of a large program to bother opening it just to do pixel art.

A while ago, I got GraphicsGale registered so I've always used that.
I often also copy stuff from GG into TGF while making little games.

MSPaint is too crap.
I know people will say otherwise, but the fact is that the palette sucks ass in the beginning and that it always resets itself, it's annoying. Even if you keep your custom palette saved as an image. It's annoying as all hell.

GraphicsGale has an easier interface, some more options and pretty much everything you need for pixel art.
Customizeable shortcut keys also help alot.

Offline Zulithe

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #34 on: September 20, 2005, 10:29:27 am
people who use mspaint and only mspaint are insane! they are restricting themselves involuntarily. graphicsgale has layer support, can create animated sprites easily, onionskin, better palette support.

By the way, here is the graphicsgale site since someone asked for it

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

The only feature it is lacking that is really of value is being able to save or load .gif files. But so what, png is better :P

Offline xanthier

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #35 on: September 28, 2005, 11:52:54 pm
I'm always switching between PSP7 and MSPaint, because I am so uncomfortable drawing with PSP's paintbrush compared to the more pixelly strokes of paint's pencil, it's kind of a hassle copying back and forth, but I'm used to it. PSP is a must-have however due to layers and color tweaking and all the advanced functions that I so rarely use.  If there is another freeware program that could fix this,
I'd certainly be willing to try it.

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For this, a long time have I waited.

Offline lief

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #36 on: September 29, 2005, 12:16:50 am
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The only feature it is lacking that is really of value is being able to save or load .gif files. But so what, png is better

I have version 1.78 and it can handle the GIF format. 

PNG is a more flexible format for static images, yes.  GIF is currently the preferred choice for online distribution of animated raster images.  I believe an animated PNG format is also available, with a view to replace the GIF format.  This format is called MNG, "multi-image network graphics", which gives you all the power of PNG in an animation (true color & alpha-channelled animation)

http://png.unicast.org/pub/mng/

Currently supported on major browsers as well!

Offline Zulithe

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #37 on: September 30, 2005, 05:05:09 pm
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I have version 1.78 and it can handle the GIF format. 
Note that I was talking about the free version. Of course the full version can save/load gifs fine.

Yes I know about animated PNG. currently there are two competing formats: apng and mng

I have emailed the graphics gale programmers about adding some form of animated png but so far they have not. They do not seem very open to feature requests and never email me back. I suggest everyone that wants animated png support to email them so we can finally get this feature and leave animated GIF in the dust forever. :)

On the surface GIF seems fine, but it is lossy (png is lossless so there is no quality loss when saving to png) and GIF is not a free & open format, while PNG is.

One reason MNG is not widely adopted is because the library required to put it into programs is HUGE (almost 1mb on its own); apng is much smaller and will probably win out over MNG in the future. Unfortunately these standards are being adopted VERY slowly and we may not see them supported in all browsers out-of-the-box for a long time

Offline crab2selout.png

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #38 on: September 30, 2005, 06:57:12 pm
gif is not lossy. Ok, maybe you can say it's lossy if you have more than 256 colours, but you say it as if there is quality loss like in the jpg format which is not true at all.

And about the GGale developers not being open to feature requests, I think it might have something to do with them not being the original developers. Several months ago the ownership changed hands to some asian guys, and looking at their change log, it seems like they might not be interested in adding on to it, instead simply finetuning the existing features.

Offline Ai

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Re: what is the best tool for pixelation?

Reply #39 on: October 01, 2005, 06:20:41 am
GIF is not inherently lossy.
Several programs change the colors when saving gif , though (most commonly quantizing to VGA colorspace, 64 intensity levels rather than 255). In addition, it doesn't support color management or gamma, so viewing a GIF in a webbrowser is less likely to give a accurate result than PNG; I encountered this recently where I would save a gif and it would be significantly darker in browser, because my display was colorcorrected and the gif was not.

If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.