Hi - I've been using Photoshop to do my pixel art, but i'm finding that it's a bit 'much', and i've had a few isues with it.

I'm trying grafx2 and I quite like the fact it's purely aimed at pixel art, plus some of the palette features are amazing!...

But I'm finding it a bit hard to get started - is there any easy advice to get me going? Anything I should know?

Eg. How does transparency work?
What are the keyboard shortcuts?
How can I crop? Copy/Paste?

Sorry for being such a noob

You can only have 1 transparent color, set it by clicking the "Layers" button at the bottom-left, check "background".

Keyboard Shortcuts

You simply pick up brushes by clicking the dashed-line button in the middle of the top row ("Brush Grab" or "Lasso" when you hover). There are many ways to crop...if you install my ToolBox, there's a Brush-to-Image script which is very handy.

Edit: Damn, mr Y beat me! :D

Edited by DawnBringer - 09 January 2012 at 6:33am

Sorry, I know there's little documentation; I've started a blog which seemed to be the right format for such tutorials/hints, but so far I have put very little in it.

To add colors manually, click the little PAL icon to open the Palette screen (or press P, or double-click the palette squares).
In this window, if you click "Used" it will show a little white mark next to any colors that are used in your image : if you modify these, the image will change. The other slots are free, so you can set their color and start using them.

If you need to import colors from another image, you can do:
1) Load the first image,
2) Load the second image as a brush (Brush FX / Load) : You may notice the brush has altered colors, because it tries to display and draw it only using your current palette
3) Brush FX / "Get brush colors" :
This will add in the current image's palette the colors that are used in the brush, in unused slots.

Grafx2 is always in 256 colors, so no matter the image you load, there will be 256 slots in the palette.
The Palette screen has several functions to allow you to reorder the palette without any visible effect on your image:
X-Swap (move a color or range)
X-Invert (a range A-B-C-D becomes D-C-B-A)
Sort
"Reduce / to uniques" (stacks all used colors at the beginning, blackens all others)

Thank you! grafx is great! I have another question

I found a palette repository in the grafx page: where do I need to save the .pal file? and how can I load the palette ( from brush factory?) ( i'm using the macosx version)

I'd really love to use the monkey island palette

Edited by moondrome - 09 April 2012 at 1:17am

my mistake
loading the palette was so easy but I had restricted the search file in the "format" field so I couldn't find the .Pal files

ok grafx is great now is time to get in action!

It's in the work-in-progress 2.4 version, so it's only available on Windows and (if you can compile it from the sources) Linux.

If you use the animation mode, you can't use layers at the same time; so it's more designed for sprite work than complex scenes.


Edited by yrizoud - 21 April 2012 at 10:22am

I don't know if it's clear, but while I develop I upload the versions I just made on the Googlecode site, it becomes available on the page : Downloads / All versions / Windows. The zips can be used directly on Windows, and also contain the full source code, so people running any Linux distribution can compile it too.

Don't hesitate to test and give us feedback, it's very useful to us and motivating. There's rather low risk too, because Grafx2 makes incremental backups every minute, so even if a version had a crashing bug, you wouldn't lose more than a minute of work.