The younger generations need some historical perspective on the remarks on Deluxe Paint by Helm and Gil.
Today we have a few classes of specialized image editors, and those that are specialized for pixel art are rather similar to Deluxe Paint 20 years ago; but in its heyday, Deluxe Paint was state of the art and it filled the same non-niche as Photoshop today: everybody used it for any image editing need.
We tend to think of Deluxe Paint as a pixel art tool because in the technological middle age when it was made any image had a limited colour palette and a small resolution (typically married in some restricted and often bizarre video mode); even in photographs single pixels mattered, and any image was effectively pixel art.
There was a long push towards higher resolution and less restricted colour: video cards improved their DAC from 2 bits if you ask nicely, to a large palette of 256 colours, to "hi-colour" modes (15/16 bits without a palette), to the current standard of 8 bits per channel. Meanwhile game graphics had to trade off resolution against colour depth, making the most of dithering, palette animation etc., and affordable high quality scanners and digital cameras were yet to come.
Image editing software obviously tried to automate realistic effects, slowly "evolving" from pushing pixels to fuzzy brushes of uncertain size as image resolution increased. The most discontinuous step in the evolution of image editors was abandoning true palettes to emulate them in 24/32 bpp images as partially as the software developer cares to.