Why not?
Because when you're doing pixel art it's generally considered "cheating" to use semi-transparent pixels. Usually, it's either 100% or 0% opacity.
If you step outside the world of mockups and pixelart that's just for art's sake, and not for inclusion in an actual videogame (or software in general) this is a retarded stance. Pixel art is used in real software, and sometimes that software isn't under your control, development-wise. You can't add support for color-key transparency because it's not your program.
Web browsers, for example. You could probably jerry-rig some ridiculous setup to use color-key transparency, but ... what a colossal waste of effort when you could just save a gif/png with transparency data in it and just do it the normal way.
Supporting alpha channels is a fairly trivial feature (said by a guy actually working on his own pixel-art editor), and omitting it would just be nutty.
If you do decide to make a pixelling app, you can instantly set yourself apart from about 99% of the rest of the pixel apps out there by NOT EMULATING DPAINT. I hate DPaint so much I wish I could go back in time and assassinate the guy who wrote it.
My ideal Pixel app:
- Layer management similar to photoshop's.
- Alpha channel. Modern game engines generally support alpha channels. Modern graphics formats support alpha channels. A lot of apps use color-for-alpha or have some bizarre method of painting alpha channels.
- Pallet management that allows me to save / load / swap pallets.
- Modern keyboard commands. I don't like having to hunt around to switch tools or brush sizes. Gimme good shortcuts or let me make up my own. Especially let me set up the mouse the way I want to so I can pick colors or paint with the background color or erase or whatever I want with whatever button.
What he said. Quite a number of us grew up with photoshop, not DPaint. Our workflow is incredibly alien to that crew. Loosely, we'd appreciate a stripped down version of photoshop with streamlined pixelling features.
Photoshop's magic wand and ADD/INTERSECT/UNION selections, in it's ability to render sections of pixel art editable, versus not, is probably one of it's most significant features. It allows me to do complex AA in seconds.
Regarding palettes, I don't built-in support for them at all. I work in true color with the pencil tool, and when I want to use a color I've already got, I hold down one of the buttons on my wacom pen that temporarily makes it the eyedropper tool instead, and just grab the color from my canvas.
If I need to keep a consistent palette between works, I have the earlier work open in another window, and use an eyedropper to sample colors from it. Having good support for multiple windows is a plus - I typically have about a hundred open in photoshop at any given time.
For each document, I have a minisize (at precise 1x resolution, not the stretched/squashed thing in the preview window) view of it open in one window, and another view at about 800%. Sometimes I'll also throw a 2x in there so I don't need to squint at my screen.
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