Pixen

Pixen

By Furnace Creek Software LLC

Description

Pixen is a professional pixel art editor designed for working with low-resolution raster art, such as those 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games. Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, native interface including support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and a lot more. LAYERS AND FILTERS Take advantage of the flexibility layers provide when working with complex pixel art. Change opacities, blend modes, and more to compose creative effects. Use filters to adjust colors and post-process your artwork. Invert colors, convert to grayscale, dither, apply sepia tone, remove alpha components, palettize, pixellate, adjust hue, exposure, brightness, contrast, and more. TOOLS Leverage Pixen's wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Brightness, Text, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse. You can even assign a different tool to the left and right mouse button. For example: pencil on the left; eraser on the right. COLOR PALETTES With Pixen, you can add and organize commonly-used colors into palettes. Pixen can also import and export color palettes in the Adobe Color Table, Microsoft Palette, JASC Palette, and GIMP Palette formats. You can even perform palette operations such as sorting colors, removing duplicate colors, and more, directly in the app. ANIMATIONS Create and arrange image frames in the filmstrip view to piece together animations. Pixen can import animations from animated GIFs, animated PNGs, and even sprite sheets! It can also export animations as animated GIFs, animated PNGs, movies, and sprite sheets. GRID AND ALIGNMENT CROSSHAIR Take advantage of Pixen's grid tools to guide you in placing pixels just where you want them. PATTERNS Define custom patterns to use while drawing with the Pencil, Line, or Eraser tool (instead of a single pixel). You can even import patterns from 1-bit images. PREVIEW While editing at high zoom levels, use the Preview feature to view the canvas scaled out. You can even play back animations and tile small images when working on patterns. CUSTOM BACKGROUNDS Pick a flat, striped, or checkered background to be drawn beneath the canvas. You can even set a reference image as a background. AND A LOT MORE... - Sync documents with Pixen for iOS over iCloud and resume your work right where you left off, regardless of device. - Pixen works great with Sidecar and Apple Pencil. You can even customize the double tap gesture. - Pixel Perfect mode removes extra pixels while drawing such that any drawn paths are at most 1 pixel in width. In other words, it removes the middle pixel of an L shape. - The Welcome window makes it easy to start a new image or animation project, open recent documents, browse the documentation, and more. - Focus on your content with Dark Mode in Pixen. - Work with all your favorite tools in full screen mode. - Customize tool hotkeys to ease the transition from other image editors. - Export your artwork in PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, BMP, TIFF, SVG, and PSD file formats. - Share your creations quickly and easily via AirDrop, Messages, email, and more! - Pixen has been around for over 15 years as a native Mac app and we'd like to keep it that way. - Pixen is compatible with both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs and takes full advantage of what macOS has to offer. Pixen is also available for iPad and syncs documents over iCloud!

Screenshots

Reviews

  • Hot garbage

    2
    By rchrd_grace
    I've used at least half a dozen different bitmap editing programs over the years, including Photoshop. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone at present. Where this really falls down is text handling. Its font rendering is terrible and makes Pixen a waste of time for technical image editing. Avoid.
  • Used for Years, Still the Best

    5
    By ThisTimothy
    I've used Pixen for several years now and I've yet to find an app that makes it easier or more convenient to animate, test, and export sprites. Honestly this app is one of the big reasons I stick with MacOS. I won't lie, there are occasionally bugs here and there, but it's nothing dire and frankly it's still significantly better than other software I've used.
  • missing features in update

    1
    By Mpaoulos
    lost ability to add images to background in update, worthless now
  • Great App

    5
    By Inertia186
    I use it to create 32x32 icons of people's faces. But I'd love to be able to use this app on a mobile device. Hopefully the dev will add this ability. But I can't knock off a star just for that.
  • Great little app

    4
    By mfessenden
    There are certainly more fully-featured alternatives out there, but the simplicity and usefulness of Pixen's tools keep me using it on a regular basis for quck work.
  • Like it, but struggle to make it work

    3
    By Reviewer 2384728934
    There are too many bugs related to selection, saving, and layers for me to use this for anything serious. I just end up being super frustrated.
  • It's okay, just not for me.

    3
    By TheWildDeadHero
    This program has a large amount of nifty features, but quite a few things bog it down for me, unfortunately. For one, I'm generally not a fan of the multi-window design pattern that Mac OS applications have, but I can deal with it. The problem with the multi-window design here is none of the windows snap/lock on to each other. Either getting the windows to snap together or creating a single window mode would greatly improve this aspect of the application. Two, the right-click tool can be pretty nifty for certain things, like setting the eraser tool while the left-click tool is the pencil. But in others, such as when the left-click tool is the selection tool, I would much rather have a right-click menu . Additionally, it eliminates one of my favorite hidden features of Microsoft Paint, the recolor tool. Three, it's pretty buggy. I've attempted to use the selection tool to copy a few bits of graphics to modify, and it would only copy the first row of pixels. Everything else was blank. There have been a few spritesheets I've also been unable to open for whatever reason. Four, they are selling dark mode for $5. I already paid $10 for this application, I'm not shelling out another $5 just so I can darken my screen. Basically, the workflow doesn't work for me, it's buggy, and they are trying to charge for dark mode. Would not recommend.
  • Crashes more often than not

    1
    By Shaolin Dave
    Try to import images sequence to animation, it plays an error some but doesn't import, no explaination given. Try to paste an image, crash. Try to add a frame, crash. Try to save, crashes without saving.
  • Keeps crashing, almost unusable

    1
    By FAPixel
    Not even 5 minutes go by before the program crashes. I can’t make art using this. Wasted money.
  • It's Amazing, Except for One Specific Thing...

    3
    By CJ Burkey
    I must say, this is my goto image editing application for almost all the images I could possibly want to edit. It's quick, it's simple, and most important of all, it works! The thing is, now, the price seems insane! I know that I wouldn't pay $15 for this program, I'd make my own simpler version in something like JavaFX. The app is amazing, but I think its original price of FREE was much better(I got it back when it used to be free). But then, on top of this, if you want a cool little dark skin, you'll have to pay $5 more! I would be fine if the app were to cost $5 and the skin free, but the other way around, it just doesn't seem right. Anyway, if you really want a pixel art editor, or even a normal image editor, and you want it to be perfect, and you have some money laying around, Pixen is not a bad choice for that.

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