Pixen
Pixel art and animation editor for macOS
Pixen is a native pixel art editor for Mac, designed for working with low-resolution raster art like the 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games. It packs all the tools pixel artists need into an intuitive, native interface, with support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and 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 like sorting colors and removing duplicates 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 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 see the canvas scaled out. You can play back animations and tile small images, handy when working on repeated 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...
iCloud Sync
Sync documents with Pixen for iOS over iCloud and resume your work right where you left off, regardless of device.
Sidecar Support
Pixen works great with Sidecar and Apple Pencil. You can even customize the double-tap gesture.
Pixel Perfect
Pixel Perfect mode removes extra pixels as you draw, so every path is at most 1 pixel wide. In other words, it removes the middle pixel of an L shape.
Welcome
The Welcome window makes it easy to start a new image or animation project, open recent documents, browse the documentation, and more.
Dark Mode
Focus on your content with Dark Mode in Pixen.
Full Screen
Work with all your favorite tools in full screen mode.
Hotkeys
Customize tool hotkeys to ease the transition from other image editors.
Wide Format Support
Export your artwork in PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, BMP, TIFF, SVG, and PSD file formats.
Sharing
Share your creations quickly and easily via AirDrop, Messages, email, and more!
15+ Year History
Pixen has been around for over 15 years as a native Mac app and we'd like to keep it that way.
Universal
Pixen is compatible with both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs and takes full advantage of everything macOS has to offer.
Native Mac App
Pixen is carefully designed for the Mac and built with native technologies such as Core Animation, Core Image, AppKit, Auto Save, and Versions.
Pixen + Playdate
Pixen is a great tool for creating graphics for Panic's Playdate console. Read this article to learn more about the latest features in Pixen specifically optimized for Playdate.
Pixen Beta on TestFlight
Help shape the future of Pixen by signing up for our beta releases on TestFlight. Just download TestFlight from the Mac App Store and join our preview program to get started.
★★★★★
Amazing for a
new artist, deserves your attention
I just recently got into pixel art. As a software developer I've always wanted to make games but felt lost when it came to creating assets. Pixen takes that fear away. It provides a great workflow when switching between the mobile and desktop versions, and all of the tools you need are just right there.
- App Store review
We hope you enjoy using Pixen on the Mac! Be sure to also check out Pixen for iOS.