Pixelmator vs Pyxel Edit

Pixelmator's interface is pleasant to look at, easy to use and specifically optimized for OS X users, making it very intuitive for long-time Mac users.

Not only does Piexelmator provide easy to use tools that you should expect in any image editor, it also has rare tools such as layer styles, liquify tools and OS X optimized, fast image manipulation engine among others.

Layer styles allow non-destructively applying effects to a layer.

Dozens of visual effects available, easily discovered from the visual Effects Browser, broken into categories. Effects have interactive dialogs and live preview.

Pixelmator can be used across any number of monitors.

Gives you common image editing capabilities almost instantly.

Pixelmator's image engine is specifically optimized for use with Macs, providing one the best performance results available on OS X.

Pixelmator costs just $30 on the App Store. Additionally, it often comes bundled with other software that you might also find useful bringing the price down.

Tiles can be animated within Pyxel Edit, with "onion skin" frame overlays to assist in making smooth frame transitions.

Pyxel Edit is widely acclaimed for its ease of use.

Given an image and specified tile dimensions, Pyxel Edit will extract a tileset with no duplicate tiles. This mostly works for flat images though. If you feed Pyxel "finished maps" you will still get a lot of duplicates.

Tile-based images (maps) built in Pyxel Edit can be serialized via XML or JSON for easy import elsewhere.

For only $9 (£6), this is one of the cheapest but also one of the best pixel editors out there.

Instantly see if your tiles are tileable and/or seamless and fix it easily.