Aseprite is an open source program to create animated sprites & pixel: Color.

Animations and visual effects are nowadays used to enhance nearly every form of multimedia, including video games. These are created by combining multiple images and effects, with an abundance of applications at your disposal.

Aseprite is one of them and offers a different approach on image editing and creating short animations.

Intuitive design makes it easy to use.

If you're nostalgic about the past era of pixel graphics and effects, you might just find this to be a suitable environment.

This is not only because of the application's aim to create such sprites, but the interface is fully designed this way as well. Although you get the impression of an old video game, with icons and tools being a little difficult to identify, accommodation is no problem at all.

Clever file support and drawing tools.

The result is either an enhanced picture or short animation to use in your project, but until you get there some effort needs to be invested.

Color.

Aseprite supports three different kind of color modes:

• RGB
• Indexed
• Grayscale

When you create a new sprite you have to choose one of these color modes. In this section you will see the details of each one.

RGB.

RGB, or RGBA, stands for Red-Green-Blue-Alpha. Each image pixel contains these four components. It means that a pixel is completelly indepedent from others.

The alpha component specifies how much opaque the color is: Alpha = 255 means completely opaque, and Alpha = 0 completely transparent.

Special note: Background layer doesn't have an alpha component, so it will be always opaque.

Indexed.

In this mode each pixels is a number that references a palette color. Your palette can contain up to 256 colors, and each pixel points to one of those colors (from 0 to 255).

Unlike RGBA, if you modify the palette color, all pixels that are referencing that color will change their appearance.

An important concept on Indexed images is that for transparent layers, we need a special index to act as the transparent color. Generally this index is 0, but you can change it from Sprite > Properties menu.

Grayscale.

It's more like RGBA, just that you have two channels: Value and Alpha. Here 0 means black and 255 is white. The alpha channel behaves exactly like in RGBA mode.

If you liked this article, subscribe to the feed by clicking the image below to keep informed about new contents of the blog: