Aseprite vs Cosmigo Pro Motion NG

You can change the playback speed of the loop and the speed of each individual frame. There are three playback modes: forward, reverse, and ping-pong. Onion Skin mode is included to speed up the animation process and to allow for tagging the timeline to help keep animations organized. There is also a live preview so you can always see the end result.

Onion Skin mode will overlay previous and next frames over the canvas so you can use them as references when drawing. For Onion Skin mode, you can adjust items like range, opacity, and tint, whether the onion frames are in front of or behind the canvas, etc.

You can tag different parts of the timeline when, for example, you need different animations for the same character. You can then loop those tagged sections individually.

Getting started with the program is straightforward. It's laid out intuitively: the main workspace in the middle, color selection on the left, tool section on the right, and animation timeline at the bottom.

All tools and the vast majority of functions have keyboard shortcuts, allowing for results to be obtained quickly.

Aseprite is a very focused program: it's not filled with icons, there's no excess functionality, and dialog boxes generally only have a couple of options so you're never overwhelmed and it's easier to learn.

Always in touch with the community and approachable via Twitter.

Tools are good, easy to use.

It makes drawing lines and shapes less jaggy by default.

Aseprite is free if you compile it yourself. Its maintainers also offer a security-signed package with a technical support license for a one time fee of $14.99. It's also easy to use and presents really awesome tools.

Aseprite is available on macOS, Windows and Linux. The unfree source code is published on GitHub.

It was designed with pixel art in mind, unlike other general-purpose image editors. This means you get lots of useful features and very little clutter from tools and features that you won't need.

The interface invites you to be creative, and since it's pixel art you are creating, this adds to the feeling of being in the right environment. Everything seems to have its natural place and thereby could make beginners feel right at home.

Aseprite has a beautiful pixel-art interface that makes it a pleasure to use.

Aseprite is scriptable using the Lua language, which can be used to automate tasks and add new functionality. Some consider the API more user-friendly than GrafX2's.

Tilemap can be drawn with tools that automatically keep your palette of tiles consistent. Both free painting and tile-placing modes work in the same workspace allowing you to easily switch between workflows.

You can separate the color information out of the image file into a separate palette file.

You can use Onion Skinning to see surrounding frames to help create animations.

The user can create normal rastered or custom grids with custom shapes, or they can just mix up all they want.

Pro Motion gives you a direct feel for the pixels: how they will lay down when pressed as soon as you've finished marquee selecting. It's thus very easy to drag around to get a perfect look, moving it a few pixels here or there.
Related to this then is the way you can play with single-color mode. You can drag-click the 'paste' to create different colored silhouettes of the selection. Even while zoomed in, you can see the exact pixels as they would be rendered if set down where your mouse is.

Oldschool pixel artists will find all their beloved functions from the Amiga Pixel Art Programs, DPaint and PPaint. Such functions include smear, paint, color cycle, mirror, kaleidoscope, tint, smooth, fill with dither or random dither, fill with spherical color fade, auto outline, and tons more.

Most keyboard shortcuts are the same as those of DPaint, so you immediately feel at home with ProMotion. You can of course re-define them as you wish.

If you want to create a simple 'masking', it's very simple. Most normal paint programs have transparency, but what they don't let you do is treat transparency as if it were another pixel on the screen.

Typically, you are required to set up layers, and use eraser to block/unblock areas to get the effect you want. This is both long-winded and uncomfortable.

Pro Motion supports the regular Layer System you would expect from Photoshop, but with the added support of animation layers (which have frames) and static image layers (for templates, backgrounds, or other static elements).

The user can copy any part of the frame or even whole animations and use them as brushes or just store them for easy re-use later.

You can easily create a mask to protect part of the image against modification, or to exclude part of the image from the brush capture action. The mask is created either by selecting the colors (from the palette or directly from the image), or by drawing it using any of the available tools (pencil, line, circle, box, etc.) Once defined, you can freeze the mask or let the program update it, based on the drawing colors.

Pro Motion gives you instant right-click access to the background color. This is useful in cases where pixels are very close to each other and you are not able to easily get the balance of each color right.

There is a free version available for Pro Motion that has a limited feature set but is a good way to check out the software. This is also a good choice for those who do not need many features but want to use a simple pixel editor. The limitations of the free version can be seen here.

There's a Gradient Tool with several modes of dithering.