I'm impatient for the
discussion from here to continue. So anyway, we all seem to have semi-irrational attachments to particular image editors. Apart from the obvious - not destroying colours and saving to a lossless format, hopefully true for all editors - I'd say these features are the ones that are most important for map-making:
1. Configurable grid (eg. 8x8, 16x16, 32x32) to double-check alignments and with a "snap to grid" ability for selection and pasting
2. Non-rectangular selection/copy/paste ability
3. Fast/easy eyedropper operations
4. Layers, if mapping a game with layers
5. Reasonable keyboard controls for most features
My editor is PSP7, which (in my dishonest opinion) is the last good PSP before the bloat balance and lack of focus on pixel-pushing tipped the scales in PSP8. I've never seriously used Photoshop or Gimp, and I have no wish to fall back to Paint unless I can help it. It has some bugs (I crash it frequently) and some annoying keystrokes and lacks thereof. I'd also say the "texture brush" is a killer feature, and probably saved me a few hours mapping Micro Machines 2. Basically, it allows you to flood-fill, paint and colour-replace with a tiled bitmap such that (if you don't make it do otherwise) all of the applied areas line up perfectly, a bit like the tartan ("plaid") paint in old cartoons, if you will.
I just remembered how, many years ago, I
resource-hacked PSP (v3.12 at the time) to have different keyboard shortcuts. I wonder if it'd take in PSP7? (It tends to fall foul of anti-crack detection.)
If any of this requires further explanation, just say. What image editor do you use, and why would you recommend it? What am I missing out on?
