Free and open source sprite editor 'Pixelorama' gets a massive upgrade

If you're working with sprites and pixel-art, you need to pay attention to Pixelorama as this free and open source program is coming on nicely and another massive upgrade is out now.

As an editor for artists, the 0.8 release that went up on September 23 has made it that step closer to an all-in-one solution for all your sprite needs. There's now a lot of different built in tools you can use, different pixel modes, animation support and much more.

Pictured - Pixelorama 0.8, town image credit.

The list of new features in v0.8 is long, here's a few quick highlights:

• The Web (HTML5) is now a supported platform of Pixelorama! It is now possible to save .png and .pxo files, as well as load image and palette files in the Web version.
• Project tabs! You can now have multiple projects open at the same time, and access each one with tabs.
• Gradient generation. A new option under the "Image" menu that lets you generate a RGB gradient.
• Added previews in all image effect dialog windows with a checkerboard background. Also placed checkerboard backgrounds in the cel buttons of the timeline, and the Export window.
• A new isometric grid.
• You can now drag & drop files into the program while it's running to open them. You can open .pxo files, image files and palette (json, gpl and pal) files this way.
• You can now draw on the tiling mode previews!
• Added Symmetry Guides. They let you change the axis of symmetry for mirroring.
• Palettes can now be created from the colors of the selected sprite.
• You can now preview how the frames of the spritesheet you are importing will look.
• You can now import image files as layers. Their size will be cropped to the project's size.
• You can import image files as brushes, patterns and palettes.
• Added Scale3X algorithm as an option to scale sprites 
• Selection region and size are now being shown when making a selection on the top, next to the position label.
• A play button has been added for playing the animation exclusively on the small canvas preview area. A zoom slider for the preview area has been added, too.
• Added support for importing PAL palette files.

This release also cleans up the UI some more with added quality of life fixes, like more options where you expect them to be for ease of use. It's looking quite lovely now. While there are a number of other pixel art editors out there - plenty of them are either too basic, too expensive, overly complicated, don't work on Linux and so on - having Pixelorama support Linux and be open source is great.

What's interesting is that it continues to show how Godot Engine can be used nicely for apps and not just games too, since that what Pixelorama was created with.

Learn more about it on the GitHub and it's also on itch.io (which has a web demo). They also have a Patreon to support it.