Best Pixel Art Software for Windows

The world’s best imaging and graphic design software is at the core of just about every creative project, from photo editing and compositing to digital painting, animation, and graphic design. And now you can harness the power of Photoshop across desktop and iPad to create wherever inspiration strikes. Our professional photography tools make it easy to do everyday edits or total image transformations across desktop and iPad. Crop, remove objects, retouch, and combine photos. Play with color and effects. And reimagine the art of photography. Posters, packaging, banners, websites — all your design projects start with Photoshop. Combine photos and text to create entirely new images. Work with unlimited layers and masks. Photoshop is now available on the web. Adobe extends Photoshop to the web for sharing, reviewing, and light editing of Photoshop cloud documents (.psdc). Collaborators can open and view your work in the browser, provide feedback, and make basic edits without downloading.

This is the official website of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins. GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, the only limit is your imagination. GIMP is used for producing icons, graphical design elements, and art for user interface components and mockups. GIMP is a high quality framework for scripted image manipulation, with multi-language support such as C, C++, Perl, Python, Scheme, and more!

Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. An intuitive user interface that stays out of your way. The dockers and panels can be moved and customized for your specific workflow. Once you have your setup, you can save it as your own workspace. You can also create your own shortcuts for commonly used tools. Over 100 professionally made brushes that come preloaded. These brushes give a good range of effects so you can see the variety of brushes that Krita has to offer. Have a shaky hand? Add a stabilizer to your brush to smoothen it out. Krita includes 3 different ways to smooth and stabilize your brush strokes. There is even a dedicated Dynamic Brush tool where you can add drag and mass. Built-in vector tools help you create comic panels. Select a word bubble template from the vector library and drag it on your canvas. Change the anchor points to create your own shapes and libraries.

Paint.NET is image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is now maintained and developed by Rick Brewster. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP. Paint.NET delivers a cost-effective alternative to pricey commercial software.

Classic Microsoft Paint should already be on your Windows PC. In the search box next to Start on the taskbar, type paint and then select Paint from the list of results. If you have the latest version of Windows 10 and want to try something new, open Paint 3D featuring new 2D and 3D tools. It's free and ready to go. Paint is still part of Windows. To open Paint, type paint in the search box on the taskbar, and then select Paint from the list of results. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, try creating in three dimensions with Paint 3D. In addition to the new 3D capabilities, many of the classic 2D features from Microsoft Paint are available to use. Paint 3D is the latest evolution of classic Paint, with a ton of new art tools to try on your 2D canvas or 3D objects. Explore the brushes and tools in Paint 3D from the Art tools menu. First, choose a color from the color palette, or use the eyedropper to pick up a color already in your workspace.

Pyxel Edit is a pixel art drawing application especially designed for working with tiles. Place tiles to form a level, edit them directly to see how they all work together, then export your tileset and the level data, and load it into your game. Tiles can even be flipped and rotated, still being editable and synced. This feature is inspired by the awesome Pixothello and Cosmigo Pro Motion, but taken one step further. It also supports making animations, and exporting them as sprite sheets or animated GIFs. Pyxel Edit was originally a free program, and the free version is still available. However continued development to make it a more solid and full featured application has taken a lot of the developers time so the next big update will be paid. Initially there will be a discounted beta version available to support continued development. Buyers of the beta will get the normal priced later versions without further cost.

Pro Motion NG is a drawing software to quickly create pixel precise images, animations, sprites, tiles and level maps as used in games. It is ideal for artists working on detailed graphics as required for mobile systems like smart phones or handheld video game devices such as Nintendo DS or Sony PS Vita. It also suites well to create light weight graphics for the web or web based applications and games. Animation and image layers stack including effects, blend modes, flattening, lock.

GrafX2 is a bitmap paint program inspired by the Amiga programs ​Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. Specialized in 256-color drawing, it includes a very large number of tools and effects that make it particularly suitable for pixel art, game graphics, and generally any detailed graphics painted with a mouse. The program is mostly developed on Haiku, Linux and Windows, but is also portable on many other platforms.

Aseprite lets you create 2D animations for video games. From sprites, to pixel-art, retro style graphics, and whatever you like about the 8-bit and 16-bit era. It has a color mode, which tell you how many colors the image can handle. All images in the sprite are in one specific mode, you cannot mix RGB images with Indexed images in the same sprite. It contains a set of layers. You can see them in the Timeline. The most important concept here is that there are two kind of layers: the background layer for opaque sprites, and transparent layers. A sprite can contain only one background layer, but several transparent layers. It contains animation frames. Each frame has a duration, i.e. how many milliseconds the frame must be on screen when the animation is being played. Integrate Aseprite in your assets pipeline with the command-line interface (CLI). Store several animations in one texture atlas.

Smart image tools for smart professionals. One stop Platform offering most popular image operations in magically simple way. We optimize your images in a click & make it easy to share, save without altering file quality. We compress your images on a secure cloud server and delete it once you download it. Our tool works on all platforms and optimizes your images on all devices and OS. With a simple user interface, you can convert any image to ASCII art within three easy steps. Just drag and drop the image and instantly get the converted file on your device. Web browser-based image splitter available for different devices and platforms whether it is an Apple iPhone, Android smartphone or Windows, Mac, Linux, PC, tablet and laptop it works smoothly across all platforms without any latency. With a simple user interface and easy to understand conversion process lets you convert image to pixel art conveniently. Just upload, wait for a few seconds and download your pixel art.

Supports many formats, including .ico, .gif, .avi, .cur, .ani., preview your animations in real time while editing sprites - No need to stop working to watch your animation, use multiple layers to make drawing and editing your art easier, onion skinning allows you to see both previous and next frames while your draw, Output your animation frames onto a single sprite sheet, output each frame to its own image file, or export the entire animation as a single .gif file. GraphicsGale's export options are flexible enough to be compatible with any workflow, GraphicsGale also has many pixel-art specific features to help you create your work quickly and easily, including palette control, selectively erasing colors, and tools for quickly replacing and trying new colors. Free download, and get creating!