With its arsenal of painterly brushes and powerful filters, it’s hard to imagine how Photoshop would function as a simple pixel art tool. The truth is, it totally can. Here’s how to set things up and utilize its tools with 6 simple steps.
1. The Pixel Grid
Often enabled by default, the PIXEL GRID is a thoughtful feature that provides a clear and organized environment to sprite in. Disable immediately.
2. The Pencil and Eraser
Much like MSPaint, the PENCIL tool lays down crisp aliased pixels.
Getting the ERASER to behave the same way requires only a simple modification.
3. The Bucket Tool
Besides being used for fills, the BUCKET TOOL can provide another function. With the CONTIGUOUS box unchecked, a fill can now be applied to every instance of a color on the layer. Oh, and don’t forget to disable ANTI-ALIAS and set your TOLERANCE to 0.
This is especially useful if you’ve got a palette of your colors on your artwork layer making color swaps a breeze.
4. Using the Magic Wand
Like the Bucket Tool, the MAGIC WAND also has a CONTIGUOUS option and behaves in much the same way. Again, remember to disable ANTI-ALIAS and set your TOLERANCE to 0.
With a color (or hold SHIFT to select more than one) selected, you can pull up the Hur/Brightness/Saturation adjustment and fine tune your palette with ease.
5. Make Art
Encouraged.
6. Exporting
With art on your canvas, it’s time to save it to an image format. Because JPEG introduces artifacts into an image and GIF is only limited to 256 colors, your image format of choice should be PNG. It also supports transparency! Who wouldn’t want that?
If you want to enlarge your sprites, you can first adjust its IMAGE SIZE. Use the PERCENTAGE unit to double or triple the size instead, it’ll save you the hassle of having to calculate the correct scale. All that’s left is to set the scaling option to NEAREST NEIGHBOR in order to preserve the blockiness of your pixels.
Questions? Comments? Let me know.
Hold up, there’s more!
1. It really needs to be emphasized that Photoshop’s pencil tool isn’t just a hard round brush, it’s the standard brush tool without anti-aliasing. The brush libraries between the two tools are completely interchangeable, it’ll automatically posterize anything you put in there:
2. Instead of using the image size menu, go to Edit > Preferences > General, set Image Interpolation to Nearest Neighbor and just use the Free Transform tool for everything. NOTE: In CS6 and up, the Free Transform tool handles interpolation independently with a dropdown menu in the options bar, which is only visible when transforming an entire layer (not a marquee selection). POOR DESIGN.
3. Image > Mode > Indexed Color will lock the picture’s palette to 256 colors or less. Here, you can take any full color image and constrain it to a specified number of palette entries- essential for INDEX PAINTING SCUM like me- or even change the color scheme entirely by extracting the palette from one image and loading it in another!
You can use Image > Mode > Color Table to alter indices after converting. It’s a bit cumbersome to work with, but it’s more straightforward than using the bucket tool to replace colors when working with simple graphics. Also you can’t use layers or pretty much 70% of Photoshop’s tools in this mode, so you’re better off pasting converted graphics back into an RBG mode file.
Pretty sure Pro Motion is the only tool that can compete with Photoshop for pixel art when you know how to use it right.
