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Add to SafariWhen comparing GraphicsGale vs GrafX2, the Slant community recommends GrafX2 for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art / sprite editors?” GrafX2 is ranked 2nd while GraphicsGale is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose GrafX2 is:
GrafX2 is scriptable using the Lua language, which can be used to automate tasks and add new functionality to it. The script library features advanced color reduction and enhancement tools, [palette analysis](http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76519), and much more.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful animation tools
The animation tools in GraphicsGale are very easy to work with. Furthermore, the live preview helps clean up the animations in real time without a hitch.
Pro Offers a great palette tool
With GraphicsGale, the user can save and load palette, create gradation, and make color uniform.
Pro Free
Graphics Gale used to cost money but recently the program switched over to a free license.
Pro Pretty easy to learn the UI and the tools you have to work with are fantastic
Pro Works really well under Wine
Wine can help emulate Windows on non-Windows systems. You can get Graphics Gale running anywhere Wine can run. See WineHQ for more details.
Pro Scriptable using Lua
GrafX2 is scriptable using the Lua language, which can be used to automate tasks and add new functionality to it. The script library features advanced color reduction and enhancement tools, palette analysis, and much more.
Pro Supports many file formats
GrafX2 supports many file formats, including the popular gif and png, but also importing and exporting from deluxe paint, degas elite, and various other editors using custom formats.
Pro Very large number of tools and effects
Pro Free, open source, and cross-platform
GrafX2 is totally free to use, copy, and modify. It's available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Haiku, AROS, MorphOS, SkyOS, Syllable, Mint, and a few more systems. Basically anything is supported by the SDL library.
Pro Palette color cycling
GraphX2 being based on older 256 bitmap software has inherited some tricks that modern pixel editors do not have . One of them being the ability to cycle color palette and produce animations and effects with it.
Pro Has a great palette tool
You can create gradients from one color to another, work in either RGB or HSL color space, save and load palettes, sort and organize palettes, and even work on "color cycling" images.
Pro Supports tileset addition and extraction
Pro Supports animations
The program has a basic support for animation using frames in newer versions. Graphics can be cloned and copied between frames and changed slightly.
See here how to animate with GrapfX2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnq6zBZOqoM
Pro Has a customizable UI with themes support
Theme UI style can easily be changed from settings including buttons and colors.
Pro Drawing constraint mode for vintage 8bits machine
The program is able to enforce the pixel constraints of old machines (C64, ZX Spectrum, Apple II, Game Boy Color, etc.)
For example, in ZX Spectrum mode, only 2 different colors can be used in a 8x8 pixel block.
Cons
Con Only available on Windows
GraphicsGale is only available on Windows.
Con UI requires a lot of clicking
The UI windows not very nice and requires a lot of clicking. For example mouse wheel is not useable at all to zoom in and out in main window.
Con Dated look and feel
It looks like it was never supposed to be used in the modern world.
Con Lack of modern features
Some modern features that are necessary to do pixel art creation for game dev work are lacking.
