Grafx2
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13676
Printed Date: 23 April 2026 at 3:29pm
Topic: Grafx2
Posted By: ingl0rius
Subject: Grafx2
Date Posted: 09 January 2012 at 5:47am
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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 |
Replies:
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 09 January 2012 at 6:25am
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Hi, I'm one of the current programmers. I set up a small document "quick start" here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcbq959n_4dzgxwp83 It should already give some pointers. I haven't updated it for quite some time, so please let me know what feels missing or misleading, so I can make it better. Transparency works by tagging one of the 256 colors as "the transparent one". By default it's color #0. Click the button called "layers" to change. The keyboard shortcuts are given (and can be modified) in the program itself, press F1 while hovering a button or while a window is open, it will open the relevant chapter for the help system. Cropping the image (or enlarging it) is done by changing the image dimensions in the "Screen size" window. The enlarged/reduced part will be bottom right; generally you'll want to use the "adjust" tool first (bottom left icon), in order to adjust the top left part. Copy/paste... there is nothing *exactly* like Windows' clipboard, instead Grafx2 uses a "brush" system, so you can use most paining tools using a part of image as a brush. The simplest is : Press B, drag a rectangle, start painting. Use the Paintbrush window (top left icon) to select a different brush, or press 'Del' to quickly switch back to single-pixel. |
Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 09 January 2012 at 6:33am
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You can only have 1 transparent color, set it by clicking the "Layers" button at the bottom-left, check "background".
http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/KeyboardShortcuts - 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 |
Posted By: moondrome
Date Posted: 22 March 2012 at 8:56am
| grafx is great but a tutorial for noobs would be great. I'd like to know ho layers work. I also need some help with the palette. for example when I load a picture the palette is limited to the colors of the image. how can I add new colors or load a full palette? |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 22 March 2012 at 9:46am
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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) |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 22 March 2012 at 5:58pm
About layers, the simplest may be to open this example image in Grafx2 and toy with it: It has 8 layers, each one with the graphic of digit 1, 2, 3 etc. Try hiding/showing some layers (right-click a layer icon), the digits appear and disappear accordingly. Try selecting a layer and drawing on it: your pixels appear above lower numbers, and below larger numbers. Try drawing in a layer using color zero (this image's transparent index) : it lets you erase, and the layers underneath become visible. |
Posted By: moondrome
Date Posted: 09 April 2012 at 1:17am
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 |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 09 April 2012 at 7:12am
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To load a .PAL file into an empty image, just use the Load dialog, navigate to where you stored the file, and load it. If you want to convert an existing image to such palette, the steps are: 1) Load your image 2) Switch to spare (Tab) 3) Load the palette, as above 4) Right-click the Page icon, and choose 'Copy to spare: palette and remap' 5) Switch to spare again (Tab). I don't understand the relation with brush factory... |
Posted By: moondrome
Date Posted: 10 April 2012 at 7:22am
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! |
Posted By: Yielmo
Date Posted: 20 April 2012 at 5:14pm
| Question: Does Grafx2 have a animation tool or something? |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 21 April 2012 at 10:19am
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. |
Posted By: Yielmo
Date Posted: 26 April 2012 at 4:40am
| Is it out yet :o |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 27 April 2012 at 7:21am
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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 / http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/downloads/list?can=2&q=label%3AOpSys-Windows - 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. |