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[Dataflashsabot]

Pixel artists!

I'm working on Pixcicle. My vision of it is, essentially:
Paint.NET-most photo things+more pixel things+animation-things that piss me off+misc random useful stuff.

So I have some questions for you artists :
What app(s) are you currently using, and why do you like them?
What pisses you off (or just mildy annoys you) about those apps?
Do you use layers often?
What tools/features do you want that these apps don't have?

[jwaap]

I like: a lot of ctrl+z's. A color swap tool, 2 colors on 2 buttons.

[Stegersaurus]

I like: a lot of ctrl+z's. A color swap tool, 2 colors on 2 buttons.

How about Undo trees? I've had so many times where I've done something like a color changeup, then undid it, then made some minor change, and forgot I wanted that color swap back. It would be cool to have a tree of where I undid so I could redo those steps I overran, but that might make the interface a bit scary

I don't do a ton of pixel art (I tend to sway more towards photoshop detailed drawings scaled down) but one thing I think is important is tools to experiment with different colors and shading. If I could change the color/brightness/contrast/saturation of a selection of colors in an image, that's cool to me. I'm a heavy user of Color Variations and Hue/Saturation/Lightness tools to change the mood of images, or do just change up an enemy from a base enemy to a fire enemy. The more methods I have of tweaking colors in different ways the better.

I primarily use Photoshop because I like how the brushes behave in a non-pixelart context. Two things I find important, if you don't realize them at first, is tablet support (I don't use my tablet for opacity, but I DO use it for brush sizes ALL the time) and the eye dropper tool (which MUST have a fast key held shortcut) to quickly select colors already used. Actually, a lot of your tools must have easy keyboard shortcuts. I don't like moving my cursor to buttons if I don't need to.

Also, yes I use layers often. They are important to me

[Dataflashsabot]

An undo tree is a very good idea, I'll look into it. Unfortunately I don't have a tablet, so unless I just type code that looks right and pray it works I doubt there'll be tablet support initially. I'm thinking of customizable shortcuts for everything. There'll definitely be lots of tools to manipulate selected colors in different ways (I'm thinking a list 'affect these colors:' which you can add to by clicking a button in the palette, and tools that would find this useful have an option to use this list. Hey, how about multiple of these color lists :D )

[kyn]

I want layers with different frames and keyframes just like in flash, to be able to animate different parts of the body separately. That's why I can't get into pixel animation, someone needs to do that system.

Also you might want to check this (sadly) abandoned thread, you might get an idea or two from it.

[Dataflashsabot]

kYn, do you mean (for instance) drawing arms and legs separately and attaching them to a vector bone system? That's something I'm considering, but it's not the easiest thing to do. It'd be pretty damn useful though.
Also, thanks for the link.

[kyn]

Oh no, nothing as complex as that. In fact I don't think it's even possible with low-res pixel art. I'm just talking of a simple layered system where I can draw and animate each limb in each different layer, it really helps with organization.

[Dataflashsabot]

Ah, do you mean making several seperate animations and then piecing the animated pieces together? If so, good idea. In fact, how about a 'scene mode'. You could make legs running, body, head bobbing, etc, make an object out of those, then load a background and move that object along a path...

...but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, make stable normal drawing and animation. 

[Inanimate]

I think Kyn means a layer system akin to Photoshop.

[J. R. Hill]

Fast and easy gradation generation.
Palette customization.

[kyn]

I think Kyn means a layer system akin to Photoshop.

Well, sorta. Except in photoshop you can only have a still image in each layer, whilst what I propose is a different animation in each layer.

[Dataflashsabot]

Ah, I see what you mean now! But since each frame should have multiple layers support, Frame Layers and Animation Layers would need to be seperate. Thanks for everyone's suggestions so far!

[george]

You could make layer trees.

[pen]

For the love of god: lightbox options. (seeing 1-2~ frames ahead and backward in the animation)

[FrankieSmileShow]

Hey. Your topic made me think about the kind of software id like for pixel art, and about what I like about the one im already using, Graphicsgale.

I made a list of a bunch of features I currently enjoy in Graphicsgale as well as some things that are lacking, or things that I can just imagine people would want to use:

Controls:
Left mouse click draws, right mouse click picks a color. Maybe another drawing mode drawing with two colors at once, one on left and the other on right mouse button like JW said

Tools:

• The usual: Zoom, Hand tool to move the view, various selection tools (rect, circle, lasso, magic wand (contiguous and non-contiguous), pencil tool, line tool, rectangle, circle, color fill.
• A text tool might seem superfluous for a pixel art program but its great to label parts of a large image, so it shouldnt be overlooked, though I dont think it needs to be really fancy.
• I really like Graphicsgale's Color Replacement tool which was basically a pen tool that only drew over whatever color was selected as the secondary color. Good for editing the colors of an image quickly.
• Functions to manipulate the full image, single frame or a selection, like mirroring, rotation.
• expanding or cropping the image canvas
• Functions to change the color depth of an image.

Color palette:

• A flexible palette where you can swap two colors easily.
• Maybe some tool to automatically generate a gradient between two of the colors within the palette. Maybe even some tools to rearrange the color palettes layout without changing the actual colors of the image (so like, you move colors in the palette but the image stays the same)
• A quick function to count the colors used in the image, and through the whole animation. Maybe its always displayed.
• A function that highlights unused colors in your palette.
• A button that displays the image and palette as a grayscale image temporarily
• Palette window should be resizeable, and stretch the size of the palette color slots depending on the size of the palette window
• RGB color sliders directly on the color palette window
• Possibility to modify colors using HSL or HSV, maybe through tabs on the color sliders part of the window
• SOme way to quickly change between several colors you use a lot. Maybe a "quick colors" mini palette that you can drag colors to from the normal palette, that you can swap through using the mouse wheel or hotkeys.

Animation:

• Onion skinning in animation is very useful. Could be using a user-selected transparent color as the see-through tone through which you can see the previous or next frames, or the onion skins could be over the whole image, though I think id prefer the former. Only one frame before and after, or both at the same time is really needed, but the ability to make it display more could be nice (maybe like in Flash where you can drag a little point in the timeline that indicates how far back and forward the onion skinning goes).
• Hotkeys to switch quickly between frames
• Adjusting the timing of the frames, individually or by group, and other frame-independant things like possibly the transparent color
• Swap frames around by drag and drop. Names display their numerical order as well as their timing in the animation. Maybe you can also name frames (though it couldnt record the frame names in for example a GIF file, so you would have to create your programs own working image files to keep some of that extra info...but you will need to anyway if you want to record layers.)

Other things:

• Brushes to draw in several sizes. Large brushes are useful to sketch an animated character before detailing the frames!
• A dithering brush. It basically takes the primary and secondary colors you selected and draws using a pattern of the two that you select from a drop-down menu. Really useful but some people consider it a dirty tool unfit for pixel art...
• A constantly updated preview window that shows you the looping animation. Add to it the ability to zoom it, slow down or speed up the preview (without having to change the animations real timing) and the ability to tile the image in the preview. Also, being able to see a tiled preview of a selection within the image would be great for making tiles.
• A strip animation preview window: You enter the information about how your animation strip works (size of the individual frames, how many per row, the offset of the frames in the image) and it generates an animation preview of these automatically. It would allow people to work on animation strips directly.
• Have the window layout be as flexible as possible. Move, resize tool windows, dock them on any side of the main program window, close them...
• Grids! Grids are cool. A single pixel grid and one that you can set to any size you want, possibly with a snap-to-grid feature. Ability to change the grid color or give them a transparency.

And also for mega bonus points:
Some batch processing tools. For instance something that will massively convert GIF images to animation strips, or the other way around.
Something that allows you to easily edit many images' color palettes at once, maybe displaying them as a mosaic as you apply changes on them.

Hot damn thats a big post. Hope that gives you some ideas about what direction to go!

[Chromanoid]

what i would like to see:
seamless tile mode -> (i ve seen this in a program called Infinity Textures) the canvas is tiled, so you can edit the edges of it without any problems.

texture as palette mode/advanced stamp mode -> during creation one can load a texture as "palette" and use a stamp tool to draw parts of the texture onto the canvas. the special thing is that the positions where the pixels came from instead of the colors are stored. so one can change the texture to change specific features of the drawing. this could be used like textures in 3d modeling.

[Dataflashsabot]

Thank you FrankieSmileShow, very useful. Regarding file format, I was thinking .pxc which would be a renamed zip file containing all the images in separate png files and an info file. Chromanoid: Tiling support, definitely.

[Shax]

I want my mousewheel to change the saturation or intensity of my current color.

I also want to be able to put down the current color but have the saturation/intensity offset by a small random amount.

[gimymblert]

fusion layer, especially: saturation, luminosity, color (hsl basically). Be careful not to confuse with HSV 

And being able to treat/see image according to these 3 characteristics!

like that:
original first, then color map, saturation map and light map...


By the way i use Idraw3 for sprite work and many request feature are in! (tile animation, auto update, etc...)

[letsap]

Seconding letterbox stuff.

Ctrl+click (left or right) to eyedropper a color to left or right button.

Zooming up to 1600%.. Oh! I've always wanted an option in something to load an image (image a), then load a palette image(image b) and make image a have only the colors present in image b.