Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Freeware
Pixen
Pixen is like Photoshop for pixel artists. It is clearly designed by people who know the needs of those working with sprites, icons and such. The tiny format of graphics demands a certain precision, and Pixen delivers that precision on tiny-format artwork. Intelligent palette management, custom backgrounds, tiled view, and my favorite: alignment crosshair. The crosshairs draw temporary guidelines to a specific pixel. It's free and open-source, so grab a copy and start modding all those NGage games you've got lying around... And it is designed for game design, as you can see from most of the screenshots. In fact, this is the perfect complement to Coldstone, where creating graphics is 99% of the 
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
KT said 7:18PM on 9-27-2005
Great googly, this sounds cool! I can't wait until I get back to my PowerBook to try this out...
*is currently waiting in line for the genus bar..*
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TF said 2:25AM on 9-28-2005
Pixen is cool. Coldstone is dead.
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Dan said 2:04PM on 9-28-2005
I used to teach "an introduction to computer design for fine art" and the first project I had my students do to become familiar with the concept of bitmapped images was create their own icon in Pixen. We moved into Photoshop and Illustrator later, but Pixen was a create precursor, introducing other concepts like layers as well.
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