Aseprite
Version 1.3.18.1 · Igara Studio · Windows 7 / 8 / 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ranked #212 in the library
A pixel editor built by people who actually ship sprite work, with an animation timeline, real onion skinning and tilemap tooling sitting alongside a drawing surface that never smooths a single pixel behind your back.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
Aseprite is a raster editor with one specific job: sprites and pixel art. Every decision in it follows from that. Brushes are hard edged by default, the zoom is integer stepped so a pixel is always a clean block on screen, selections snap to the grid, and there is no antialiasing quietly softening an edge you drew deliberately. If you have tried doing pixel work in a general purpose photo editor you already know why that matters.
The animation side is the other half of the program. Frames run along a timeline with layers stacked vertically, onion skinning shows the frames either side of the current one at reduced opacity, and tags let you name and loop ranges so a walk cycle and an attack animation live in one file. Playback runs in the canvas at the real frame rate with per-frame timing, so you judge the motion rather than guessing from a stack of stills.
Export is where a lot of pixel tools fall down and this one does not. Sprite sheets come out with configurable padding, packing and trimming, along with a JSON data file describing every frame and tag so a game engine can read the layout directly. Individual frames, animated GIFs, layered PSD files and scaled up PNGs are all one dialogue away. The command line interface does the same exports headlessly, which is how it ends up in build scripts.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Animation timeline with onion skin
Frames, layers and cels in one grid, with adjustable onion skin range and tint, per-frame duration, and tagged loops for separate animations in a single document.
Pixel accurate drawing tools
Pencil, line, curve, contour, polygon and shading tools that write exact pixels, plus symmetry modes, custom brushes and pixel perfect stroke correction that removes doubled corner pixels.
Tilemap and tileset editing
Paint directly with tiles, edit a tile once and see every instance update, and manage multiple tilesets in the same document for level and background work.
Palette and colour management
Indexed, RGBA and grayscale modes, palette editing with ramps and sorting, colour replacement across a whole document, and preset palettes for the classic hardware limits.
Sprite sheet and data export
Pack sheets by rows, columns or a best fit layout with trimming and padding, and write a JSON sidecar containing frame rectangles, durations and tag ranges.
Scripting and command line
A Lua scripting API for custom tools and batch operations, plus a command line mode that performs conversions and sheet exports without opening the interface.
Changed in this build
Version 1.3.18.1
- Tilemap editing gained a flood fill mode that respects tile boundaries.
- Faster canvas rendering on very large documents with many layers.
- Improved GIF export colour quantisation on sprites using more than the palette limit.
- New keyboard shortcut editor with searchable command list and conflict warnings.
- Fixed several cases where undo history was lost after a tag was renamed.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Extract the archive to a folder of your choosing.
- Run the installer, or use the portable folder directly if you would rather not install anything.
- Copy the included licence data into the program folder before first launch.
- Start Aseprite and check that the title bar shows the full version rather than a trial notice.
- Set your preferred theme and grid defaults in preferences.
- No offline step is required. It does not contact anything on launch.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- The portable build keeps its settings next to the executable, so it runs from a stick without leaving anything on the host machine.
- Files use the ase and aseprite extensions, which are the same format under two names.
- If the canvas renders with visible blur, switch the interface scaling to an integer value in preferences.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 7 through Windows 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Processor | Any dual core processor from the last fifteen years |
| Memory | 2 GB minimum, 4 GB comfortable for long animations |
| Graphics | Any GPU with OpenGL 2.1, or the software renderer fallback |
| Storage | 150 MB for the program and its resources |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Can it open Photoshop files?
- It imports layered PSD files and exports to them, though layer effects are flattened on the way in.
- Does it do frame by frame and tilemaps in one document?
- Yes. A tilemap layer sits in the same timeline as normal layers and animates alongside them.
- Is there a way to batch export a whole folder?
- Use the command line mode. One call per file in a loop handles a directory of sprites without opening the interface.
Download
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