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GraphicsGale

I get what you are trying to do and it's nice just don't expect many people to play along :(

I don't do any sort of graphics but I prefer Photoshop it has a nice layering system the tool bar is easy to understand the filters and other effects are good, for pixel artistry I would say its not too bad? Just make sure anti alising is turned off first.

I'm a strange one. I actually like to use the DM icon editor for all base icons, and anything else that is 32x32 or below in size. For larger things, I usually use a combination of paint and photoshop.

I use the DM icon editor that way because I rarely need any fancy features like layering with smaller icons or bases, and that means its easier to set up the animations, alpha, icon states, and such exactly how I want.

I use paint for the early stages of larger icons, because it has a good, quick, and very simple set up. Its zoom limits, image size handling, and such just make it easy to get a good outline going and to quickly copy and flip things as necessary too.

I switch to photoshop after that because layering is essential, using custom patterns that I've drawn in previous art is useful, color changing is much easier, and such. Granted, there are a lot of things I could do this with, but I find photoshop to be my preference. I've glanced at a couple of others, including paint.net, and photoshop just seemed easier to get use to. It came naturally, at least with the basics that I use for pixel art.

I prefer to use the DM tool to create icons well below a certain size. But for larger projects, I utilize Photoshop mainly because of the sweet zoom tool. Plus, the layers helps me divide my work into multiple parts, thus keeping important parts I may need to edit later, whilst still working on the project at hand. Simply save into PSD format and I keep all my work with me. PNG format when I'm done, and I can always refer to my past projects later to tweak a thing or two if necessary.

Graphics Gale is in my opinion the best pixel art program out there and it's free. (You have to pay if you want to export in gifs, but that's hardly a sacrifice for most of us.)

Graphics gale contains 1 animation frame with adjustable speed that you can view real time, if your "animating" in Byond your wasting your wasting your time with the back and forth clicking/sideways-scrolling. Since it's animation is real time it allows you to optimize your animations and make them very smooth without much effort. I also use the Animation Frames to make minor tweaks to icons and compare it to the original.

Not only that but they also allow layers which is perfect if your doing clothing for mobs. Another thing I do with layers is use them to make directional animations, so all "Layer 1" layers are north while "Layer 2" is south and so on. It also provides all the standard tools I see in most pixel art programs (Though I haven't tried many out for long, after Graphics Gale there really isn't much to be desired.) Last but not least they have a Preview panel that you can adjust, it's not flexible since it's percentage zooms are set, but 100, 75, 50, and 25 are plenty enough to do it's job which is to give a view of the entire piece in it's fullness, the Loupe Box is also nice since it zooms it fully so your accurate and know exactly where your placing the pixel.

Graphics Gale also offers customization in terms of Panel placements which is great. The downfalls are that I find the customization of Panels slightly awkward, the other downfall is that it me some time to get used to it and there's really not much help for the programs even inside the program's help file (Although it's still helpful.) Still after getting used it it's 100% worth it, if your not used to then get used to it because you'll at least love it.