Three years after switching from Photoshop to Aseprite

In May 2023 I let my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription lapse. I had been doing my pixel art in Photoshop since 2015 — eight years of muscle memory — and I was sceptical that the $19.99 Aseprite licence could replace a tool I knew that intimately. Three years and several hundred sprites later, I have opinions.

This is not a "Photoshop bad, Aseprite good" piece. Photoshop is an extraordinary program made by people who have thought about image editing harder than almost anyone. What I want to write about is what specifically Aseprite does that made the transition stick, the few things I genuinely miss, and the one shortcut that justified the switch in the first week.

The shortcut that paid for the licence

In Photoshop, drawing a 1-pixel line at an arbitrary angle requires either careful pencil-tool clicking with Shift held down, or a custom action. In Aseprite, you press L, click where the line starts, drag to where it ends, release. There is no shape tool to switch to. The line tool is permanently on L, the rectangle on U, the ellipse on O, and pressing any of them while a tool is mid-stroke completes the stroke first. The keyboard layout was designed by someone who has actually drawn pixel art.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not. I spent something like fifteen percent of my Photoshop pixel-art time fighting tool modality — switching tools to draw a straight line, then switching back, then accidentally creating a vector shape layer. Aseprite removed that friction in week one.

What Aseprite does that I cannot replicate elsewhere

The colour-shifting tools. Aseprite stores indexed-colour sprites natively. When you change colour index 7 from light-blue to peach, every pixel in your sprite that was index 7 becomes peach. This makes palette experiments effectively free. Want to see your character in autumn colours? Drag-select half your palette and shift the hue. In Photoshop, the closest workflow is Hue/Saturation adjustment layers, which are powerful but operate in continuous space — you can't grab "all pixels of exactly this colour and move them" the way you can in indexed mode.

The animation timeline. Photoshop has timeline animation. It is, charitably, an afterthought. Aseprite's timeline is the heart of the program. Frames live next to layers in a grid. Onion-skinning is one click. Animation tags (named loops like walk-down, idle, attack) live with the sprite and export as separate sheets. The whole flow feels like it was designed by someone who has actually made sprite animations.

The pixel-perfect ink mode. When pixel-perfect mode is on, dragging the pencil produces a clean 1-pixel-wide stroke with no double-corner blobs. There is no equivalent in Photoshop without scripting; the pencil tool will always leave you the doubled corners that 90 percent of beginner pixel art has.

Tilemap mode. Introduced in v1.3 and genuinely the best implementation of tile-based pixel editing I have used. I wrote a longer post about my tilemap workflow recently.

Sane defaults for pixel work. Anti-aliasing off. Nearest-neighbour scaling. No texture blending. No subpixel positioning. These are all settable in Photoshop but you have to remember to set them every time you start. Aseprite is set up correctly by default; if you accidentally do something pixel-incorrect, the tool gently fights you.

What I genuinely miss from Photoshop

Layer effects. Drop-shadow, glow, bevel. I draw mockups and marketing assets in Aseprite and then sometimes have to bounce out to a separate tool to add a glow to a logo. Aseprite has filters but they are global, not per-layer.

Smart objects. Being able to embed a small sprite inside a larger composition and have the larger composition update when the small one changes. This is fixable with Aseprite's external-files import, but it's not the same fluency.

Selection algebra. Photoshop's selection tools are decades of UX work. Subtracting from a selection, intersecting two selections, feathering by exactly N pixels. Aseprite's selection is fine for most things but you notice when you reach for a Photoshop habit.

The Healing Brush. This is mostly a photographic tool but I have used it for cleaning up scanned line-art before vectorising into pixels. Aseprite has no equivalent and I miss it three or four times a year.

What didn't matter as much as I expected

Photoshop's filters. I thought I would miss Gaussian Blur, Sharpen, Noise. In practice, none of these belong in pixel work, and the few times I do need them I do them in GIMP or Affinity Photo.

Photoshop's brush engine. It's still the best brush engine in any program. But for pixel art the answer is almost always "use a 1-pixel pencil with no jitter", so the brush engine ends up unused.

The price. Aseprite is $19.99. Source is available for compilation by anyone who wants the executable for free. LibreSprite is a free fork — I compared the two recently. Photoshop is $19.99 a month, every month. The break-even is one month.

What I'd say to someone considering the switch

If you make pixel art and you use Photoshop, you are not doing anything wrong, but you are paying for capabilities you almost never use and missing capabilities you would use every day. The fastest way to know if Aseprite is for you is to do one small piece of work in it — a single 32×32 character, start to finish, including animation. If you make it through that exercise and miss Photoshop, stay on Photoshop. If you make it through and you don't, you'll save money and gain time.

Three years in, I still occasionally open Photoshop. I open it for everything except pixel art.