Best pixel art package?
 

Up till now I've been staunchly old-school and doing all my pixel art in DPaint on my A2000, but what's the best PC pixel-art package that can also handle animation?

I think the best is Pro Motion NG Pro.
https://www.cosmigo.com

You might want to try this one out. It has a very unique take on pixel art and allows for animation, multiple resolutions and colour control.

https://nevercenter.com/pixelmash/

Then of course there is a modern day program inspired by Deluxe Paint and Brilliance.

http://grafx2.chez.com/

I use Pro Motion NG but I've heard a lot of good things about Aseprite and will be giving it a go soon...

https://www.aseprite.org/

Sweet, thanks guys!

I have a busy couple of nights ahead of me...

Never tried it myself but most people I have contact with seem to use Asesprite.

I think they all miss a proper dither brush, so I stay with GIMP (which doesn't have one as well, but simply works for me otherwise).

I use grafx2.

https://i.ibb.co/kcFFBQB/Clipboard02.png

https://i.ibb.co/3BGJHtX/Clipboard02.png

I use grafx2 too (on macOS) for pixel graphics. I can't really think of a feature it doesn't have. (It supports animation)

I use pro-motion NG- its very similar to D-paint. Although I have not found the dither tool in it yet either- maybe under a new name in this version.

I use mostly the following tools.

Paint.NET (Windows) (with several plugins)
Used for overall image and sprite sheet manipulation

PPaint 7.1 (Amiga)
Used mainly for palette changing

Promotion-NG (Windows)
Very useful tool, lots of overlap with PPaint but it has bugs with saving IFF files. Also great for creating tile maps. I need to learn this tool more.

Texture Packer (Windows)
Awesome for creating and animating sprite sheets

Tiled (Windows)
Used for level/world creation

XnConvert (Windows)
Used for some image conversion when PPaint isn't up to it.

ffmpeg & irfanview
Used for all kinds of specialised stuff to do with ripping assets

Geezer

Never heard of it, but it looks amazing. Have you just made me spend some money?

Hah... that might be.
I personally only used it a little, but I know these guys (awesome artists) that are creating Metro Siege for the Amiga is using it.
I've seen in some tutorials what it can do, and I was amazed.

So, I don't think you wasted your money :)

Also a Pro Motion NG fan here. Being able to limit color depth to 4-bit for OCS art is really useful.

grafx2 can also do this.

I like how grafx2 literally looks like an Amiga program. It instantly makes me feel at home with it.

Pixelmash looks bloody brilliant though.

I use GraphicsGale for the fairly lightweight pixel art I do from time to time. Suits my purposes.

https://graphicsgale.com/us/

Excuse my ignorance but what is the benefit of 4 bit colour depth for amiga graphics?

OCS/ECS limits color depth to 4 bits per component (i.e. 16 shades each of red/green/blue). AGA/RTG increases that to 8bpc.

Making assets in 8bpc and reducing them to 4bpc is risky. While it can be done mathematically the result is not always artistically desirable. I've had to recreate whole color ramps to get the look right after doing this.

Pixel art also has strong interactions at color boundaries. A few % rounding in RGB on either side can change the antialiasing patterns needed to get the right blend or line thickness.

I much prefer to work with 16-step color sliders all the way through production. But perhaps I'm just picky. :D

Libresprite is the last OSS version of AseSprite. Its quite nice for being free:
http://www.libresprite.org/