I've often thought about what my ideal pixel art graphics tool would be like, so the other day I decided I'd have a go at actually making it!
My main goals are:
* Ultra streamlined and responsive interface (no unnecessary features and clutter, like you get with a more powerful all-purpose image editor).
* Concise range of drawing tools (adding some useful features missing from basic image editors, and removing all those not essential for pure pixel art).
* Good color selection and palette editing features (proper color wheel for selecting colors, easy creation of color ramps etc).
This is roughly how it should look:
There are only 3 tools (the stolen icons are temporary), but they're kind of multi-functional - the brush tool can be used for freehand painting or for drawing straight lines; the selection tool can be used for box or magic wand selection (with adjustable tolerance and additive/subtractive selection); holding "ctrl" always lets you pick a color; holding "alt" always lets you pan the viewing area; etc. The idea is that there's no switching back and forth between tools.
It makes heavy use of a custom pixel shader, which takes a greyscale image (where the red component corresponds to a palette index), and then zooms, pans, superimposes a grid on it, and loads colors from a 16x16 (256 color) palette image. It would be nice if I could add animation features (eg. onion-skinning) but not a high priority.
Are you sure there isn't already something out there that does what you want though? Seems like there would be.
Such as: http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/
Trust me, I've tried just about every raster graphics editor out there, and there's definitely still room for improvement. There just isn't anything that I feel has the right combination of features and usability (Paintshop Pro comes closest but isn't really optimized for working with a limited palette).
Graphics Gale is designed for pixel artists, but it has a very different design philosophy. Like most other apps, it tries to make creating pixel art quicker and easier by adding a ton of extra tools for very specific tasks. I want to make creating pixel art quicker and easier by improving the user interface - making tools more accessible, efficient, versatile and intuitive, and removing all unnecessary clutter.
Graphics Gale's user interface is among the worst I've ever seen. The flaws aren't huge, but there are just so many minor annoyances that I would never consider using it.
For example:
If I'm using the magic wand tool and want to change (or even just view) the tolerance setting, I have to click on the little arrow next to the tool button, then click on the options button, then manually type in a value, then click ok.
In Paintshop Pro, as long as the magic wand tool is selected, the settings (ie. tolerance) are clearly accessible - and there's even a handy little slider built into the edit box, so changing it takes a mere fraction of a second. It also allows both additive and subtractive selection (GG only allows additive), which is an essential for me.
With my application, I'd do that, plus combine the magic wand and box selection tools (so there's no switching back and forth) and add a "dynamic tolerance" feature - so you shift click and then move the mouse up/down to increase/decrease tolerance, and can see in realtime the pixels that would be selected, and then release the mouse button when happy - or perhaps a "selection brush", so you can paint pixels to select them...
And yes, this is being done in MMF2 (although a lot of the heavy lifting is handled by a pixel shader). Funnily enough, the hardest part so far has been getting it to adapt properly to changing window sizes (when the user maximizes / stretches the window) - mainly due to a bug in MMF2 and/or the window control object, when working with certain pixel shaders.
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