Pixen 4+
Pixel art and animation editor
Furnace Creek Software LLC
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- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
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!
What’s New
Version 5.4.7
- Pixen is fully compatible with macOS 15 "Sequoia"
- Improved UI makes it more obvious when colors are selected in color palettes
Ratings and Reviews
Used for Years, Still the Best
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.
Great pixel character editing software
works very well and has good colors to choose from I enjoy all of the tools which make it easy to cut out sections of the image and change it up for different sprite positions. Im still learning how to use this app but so far its been amazing and helped me create my own game with custom assets for everything. I plan on using it for a long time
Developer Response ,
Thank you! Please email us if you have any feature requests.
Best. Pixel. Art. Editing. Tool. I. Have. Ever. Used.
.... and I haven't even started animating, nor used a *single* plugin yet... or... read the docs....
( o _ o )
App Privacy
The developer, Furnace Creek Software LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Furnace Creek Software LLC
- Size
- 7.8 MB
- Category
- Graphics & Design
- Compatibility
-
- Mac
- Requires macOS 12.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2024 Furnace Creek Software
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
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- Pro: One Time Purchase $9.99