Pixel Studio for pixel art 4+

Handy little program!

I've enjoyed dabbling with this program. Getting used to its file management quirks and UI took a hot second, but it does what I need it to do: craft and animate pixel art! I appreciate being able to see all layers and frames and having the ability to scrub through the timeline with ease.

A few issues I've run into with my workflow, however:
1.) I noticed that the selection of a tool happens on the up-click of the mouse. I'm not proficient yet with implementing hotkeys, so I tend to do a lot of point-and-click maneuvering with tool usage. As such, I move my mouse pretty quickly, so sometimes, after I click down to choose a new tool, I'll have moved the mouse cursor off the tool prior to the up-click, meaning the tool is not selected and I have to go re-select what I want again. An option to change selection from up-click to down-click would be handy.

2.) Pressing Left or Right on the keyboard while the timeline is selected will jump you forward or backward 3 or 4 frames. This is fine, but I've found that unfortunately, this will also simultaneously move whatever layer is selected on that new frame left or right. And you can't see that action occur, as it happens at the same time as the frame jump. Maybe there's a way to change the hotkeys to get around this issue.

Just some little nitpicks. It's a great program! :)

Developer Response ,

Hi! Thank you for such a thoughtful review. We’ll think how to make it better. Good luck!

pretty good but major flaws are obvious

the app works well enough and even has impressive features. however, the fact that every time i click a new frame in animation it auto-selects the lowest layer is annoying. i always have to click multiple times just to do one function. there are no hotkeys from what i can tell and if there are, it's not anywhere i can find, even after searching online. you can only save 1 animation per hour in the free version, and i'd be overall fine with this if it weren't for the fact that i just canceled a save when i realized i wanted to loop 4 times instead of 3 and even though i didn't save, the app still told me i had to wait an hour, so that's a pretty obvious coding oversight on the side of the dev. i could go on but i don't want to be bothered since the dev can't be either.

Missing Basic Tools

The UI is frustrating to work in. It takes far too much clicking around to find what you're looking for, and settings are in three different places. It's kind of baffling. There is no way to export multiple frames at a time, unless you tie them into a gif, which is unuseful if you're using the software for a larger project, in conjunction with other software. I purchased the Pro version because it seemed like there would be an option to do this (Export PSD Frames), but after purchasing, and exporting using this option, it still only exports 1 frame at a time. This is EXTREMELY disappointing. Other than that, the software is capable, and the Pixel Network Community is awesome. But yeah, there's a lot of missing tools here, and I find myself looking at Pixen and other options for my project.

Developer Response ,

Hi! Sorry to hear that. You can export frames as sprite sheets, perhaps this could be more suitable for you. Thank you for the review!