Pixen
macOS / Graphisme et design
Pixen is a professional pixel art editor designed for working with low-resolution raster art, such as those 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games. Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, native interface including support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and a lot more.
LAYERS AND FILTERS
Take advantage of the flexibility layers provide when working with complex pixel art. Change opacities, blend modes, and more to compose creative effects.
Use filters to adjust colors and post-process your artwork. Invert colors, convert to grayscale, dither, apply sepia tone, remove alpha components, palettize, pixellate, adjust hue, exposure, brightness, contrast, and more.
TOOLS
Leverage Pixen's wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Brightness, Text, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse. You can even assign a different tool to the left and right mouse button. For example: pencil on the left; eraser on the right.
COLOR PALETTES
With Pixen, you can add and organize commonly-used colors into palettes. Pixen can also import and export color palettes in the Adobe Color Table, Microsoft Palette, JASC Palette, and GIMP Palette formats. You can even perform palette operations such as sorting colors, removing duplicate colors, and more, directly in the app.
ANIMATIONS
Create and arrange image frames in the filmstrip view to piece together animations. Pixen can import animations from animated GIFs, animated PNGs, and even sprite sheets! It can also export animations as animated GIFs, animated PNGs, movies, and sprite sheets.
GRID AND ALIGNMENT CROSSHAIR
Take advantage of Pixen's grid and alignment tools and create pixel-perfect artwork.
PATTERNS
Define custom patterns to use while drawing with the Pencil, Line, or Eraser tool (instead of a single pixel). You can even import patterns from 1-bit images.
PREVIEW
While editing at high zoom levels, use the Preview feature to view the canvas scaled out. You can even play back animations and tile small images when working on patterns.
CUSTOM BACKGROUNDS
Pick a flat, striped, or checkered background to be drawn beneath the canvas. You can even set a reference image as a background.
AND A LOT MORE...
- Sync documents with Pixen for iOS over iCloud and resume your work right where you left off, regardless of device.
- Pixen works great with Sidecar and Apple Pencil. You can even customize the double tap gesture.
- Pixel Perfect mode removes extra pixels while drawing such that any drawn paths are at most 1 pixel in width. In other words, it removes the middle pixel of an L shape.
- The Welcome window makes it easy to start a new image or animation project, open recent documents, browse the documentation, and more.
- Focus on your content with Dark Mode in Pixen.
- Work with all your favorite tools in full screen mode.
- Customize tool hotkeys to ease the transition from other image editors.
- Export your artwork in PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, BMP, TIFF, SVG, and PSD file formats.
- Share your creations quickly and easily via AirDrop, Messages, email, and more!
- Pixen has been around for over 15 years as a native Mac app and we'd like to keep it that way.
- Pixen is compatible with both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs and takes full advantage of what macOS has to offer.
Pixen is also available for iPad and syncs documents over iCloud!
Quoi de neuf dans la dernière version ?
Pixen 6 is here with an improved design, new features, and many quality of life improvements.
- Enjoy a refreshed design with support for macOS 26 and Liquid Glass with a new icon, updated controls, and menu icons
- Turn Liquid Glass effects off or on under sidebars and toolbars independently in the Settings window
- Create, sort, edit, and organize color palettes directly in the main document window
- Speed up drawing symmetrical objects with the Mirror X / Mirror Y options for the Pencil tool
- Use the new "Clone Layer to All Frames" command to propagate layer changes to all frames in an animation, perfect for updating a background that is shared across all frames
- Hide the layers sidebar on the right to free up screen space
- Use new keyboard shortcuts to bring up the Welcome window and color panel
- Use new keyboard shortcuts for canvas rotation commands
- Navigate to the previous/next row in color palettes using up/down arrow keys
- Access the Trim Canvas command more easily
Pixen 6 also features many smaller quality of life improvements:
- Improved the reliability of drag and drop operations in color palettes
- Improved the default file name in the frame sequence export sheet
- The last selected frame sequence image format is now remembered across exports
- Fixed a bug where rotated images could end up being offset by an extra pixel
- Fixed a bug where opening the background picker popover could select the wrong background
- Pixen now warns when trying to export a project without adding export formats
- Improved performance throughout the app, especially on older Macs
