Is Adobe Photoshop Good For Pixel Art?

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Adobe Photoshop is a highly popular and functional image editor program but it works excellently for making pixel art.

If you just open a small canvas and use its pencil tool, you can start creating and editing your pixel art right away. Robust selection tools, color editing, blending modes, animation timeline tools are great to create amazing pixel art.

But,

Choosing Adobe Photoshop just for pixel art is clearly an overkill. Being a costly and full-fledged photo editing and graphic designing tool, using Photoshop just for pixel art is not a good decision.

However, it is perfect if you want to use its big range of designing and editing tools.

The smallest package for Adobe Photoshop is about 10 US$/month. So, along with pixel art, if you want to use it as a graphic designing and photo-editing tool then Photoshop is a perfect option. But, if you need only a pixel art software, you should choose another pixel art software such as Aseprite, GrafX2, GIMP, or Krita.

However, Adobe Photoshop is a capable software with various advanced features for professional graphic designers and pixel artists. Its versatility is the things that do not let is become the best fit for creating pixel art.

You can use Adobe Photoshop to create Pixel Art from Photos too. So, whether you want to create a character or an 8-bit portrait, Photoshop can help you with this too.

Also Read: 15 Interesting Fact and Stats About Adobe Photoshop

How to create pixel art using Adobe Photoshop?

The best way to start creating your pixel art is to start with selecting a small canvas and then set a grid layout. Pencil tool is the perfect way to start creating pixel art easily on Photoshop. Let’s know the process briefly below.

1. Set-up the canvas

To create a new canvas, just go to File>>New>>Give your canvas name>>Change units to Pixels (e.g. 50×50).

2. Set-up a Grid

Go to View>>Show>>Grid and you will get an auto-inserted grid on your canvas. The lines will probably be too big.

How to configure canvas for Pixel art in Adobe Photoshop?

To, get them shortened, go go to Edit>>Preferences>>Guides, Grids, and Slices. Under the grid line, change the units from inches to pixels. Now, change the subdivisions to 1. There, you can also change the color of the blocks.

Now, go to General option on the same tab, change image interpolation option to Preserve hard edges.

3. Create a new layer to start painting

Now, you have to create a new layer to start your painting process. This is the place where everyone goes wrong. People start to design using the brush tools as they use for other works. The same thing doesn’t comply with pixel art.

So, once you have set-up two different layers, hold down the brush tool and select the pencil tool instead of a brush in the tool pane on the left side.

Choose the right size of brush to fill the blocks appropriately. Pick your desired color and add it to the swatches for convenience. You can browse more colors here colors.adobe.com.

4. Draw your Pixel Art

Now, when everything is finished, you just have to use your pencil tool and start filling the grids to create your pixel art.

If anything goes wrong along the way, you can simply use the eraser tool to erase the inputs.

For testing, just create any random image by using different colors.

5. Remove the grid when you are done

After you finished creating your pixel art using the grids, you can simply disable the grid by going to the same path from where we have enabled it i.e. View>>Show>>Grid.

Now, you can merge layers to apply those changes.

6. Save your work

As per your requirements, you may require a different dimension of your pixel art. But, because you had selected the canvas size to 50×50, you will get a pretty small image which will not be suitable for any top-notch purpose.

How to change the size of a graphic on Photoshop without losing the quality?

Go to Image>>Image Size. Change the dimensions as per your needs. Now, under the resampling, choose the option Nearest Neighbour (hard edges). Now, you can go to File>>Save As to save your artwork in a big size.

Drawbacks of using Adobe Photoshop for Pixel Art

Creating pixel-art is not a tough task to do as compared to photo editing or complex graphic designing. But, if you are using Adobe Photoshop which is a professional photo editor, you may have to face hassles as a beginners.

Although, Adobe Photoshop can help you to design amazing artwork but if you put the same efforts to learn any other pixel-art oriented software like Asperite, you will be able to get amazing results.

Another drawback of Adobe Photoshop is its high pricing plan. You should opt for its paid plan only if you know how to make the most out of this tool for various other tasks. Otherwise, you have a lot of options to choose from. Let’s also know about them below.

Best Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop for Pixel Art

Below are some great alternatives to Adobe Photoshop if you want to have great offerings as an artists.

Final Words:

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