LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor
libresprite.github.io272 points by nicoloren 19 hours ago
272 points by nicoloren 19 hours ago
This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.
The history section of the repo clears it up [0]
> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.
> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.
Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt
Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.
[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...
Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource.
This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.
LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.
The person you're replying to was making a clarification on the license, not arguing about the validity of changing the license or charging for it.
Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.
I think aseprite is a perfectly fine project, but where possible, I like to use open source tools rather than proprietary tools.
I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.
A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.
It's good to have open source software.
It's good to support honest and high quality proprietary software.
Aseprite offers the latter good, this offers the former good.
Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.
1. Asperite is not open source.
2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.
Aseprite is open source. The source is open for anyone to access right here: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite
You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.
"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".
"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".
[0]: https://opensource.org/osd
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
Source available is not open source. Don’t try to redefine what open source means. It’s so insulting to volunteers hard work.
How can you say its open source and 3 sentences later that it has a proprietary license.
Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.
Aseprite is such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers
Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.
didn't even realize Aseprite is source available!
I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.
I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.
Aseprite is absolutely worth paying for. I do game jams and it works really well.
I’ve paid for a few licenses so far just to support the guy making it. It’s a crucial tool in my gamedev workflow, and really couldn’t do without.
And for emergencies, there is always DPaint JS!
Haven't used LibreSprite but Aseprite, from which it forked, has been an enormous boon to me, for pixel arting it definitely fits my habits and abilities much better than anything else I tried (GIMP, Krita, GrafX2, actual DPaint, Digipaint...).
The newest news post on this barebones site is from 2023, announcing the MacOS downloads. On the news page there's two other posts; the oldest one is from 2022, and talks about a complete rewrite of the code. I think this fork looks pretty dead.
The master branch had a commit 3 weeks ago. But also, if it worked in 2022 I would sure hope it works now. Not everything needs to be updated forever.
I mean if you're the kind of person who'd happily skip out on two major versions worth of bugfixes, updates, and new features in favor of the right source-code license, then sure I guess it's a better choice.
I've used libresprite and generally think it's very nice, but I'd really recommend using GIMP or Krita over it for most pixel art, learning those is useful outside of pixel art
I use GIMP and GrafX2 for my sprite art. The latter being an old-school type program in the tradition of Deluxe Paint.
GrafX2 looks cool, I'll consider it if I'm doing something specifically for older micros like the amiga
Aseprite is the best tool for pixel art full stop
It depends on what you are doing. I really like it for creating animated characters. Resprite has some nice feature for creating tilesets. Standard raster editing software might be better for big static scenes.
Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.
The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".
I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.
I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)
Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...
"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.
The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.
So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..
You're not wrong but neither IMO is the person you're responding to. emacs wasn't renamed LibrEmacs. gcc wasn't renamed Librecc. "Libre" can both be trying to convey something, and an arguably a bad name that turn lots of people off.
One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.
At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)
Almost any name is better than GIMP.
It would be impossible to come up with a name that reflected the nature of the gimp program better.
LibreOffice ?
Yes, that is one of the major offenders. It is very awkward to pronounce in many languages.
I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.
A good indicator is that the Wikipedia page even has pronounciation information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
What other major software has that?
> What other major software has that?
Linux?
EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...
Somewhat disappointingly, it’s just pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled: LEE-bruh-OFF-iss
Ref: https://youtu.be/YHBve8v13VY?si=Bql2vH6C4goZN_kX
From your comment somehow I was expecting something a bit more exotic
Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.
Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).
> even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood
I'd go for "LEE-broffis" which I don't think is all that hideously far away?
Wait, it's not leeb-er?
The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.
"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.
I actually paid for a license for Aseprite a few years ago. I'm not 100% sure why I did, other than "this seems neat".
I like it a lot. Pixel art is shockingly approachable and the animation stuff in Aseprite is pretty fun.
I still haven't tried LibreSprite, so I don't know if it's better.
I'll shill this project again: I built myself a small sprite generator because I'm a terrible artist.
If you're looking for pixel-art sprites, check out 8bitsmith.com. Or you can just ask Nano-Banana for sprite sheets and it does a pretty good job!
You still have to do some post-processing work around NB, since you’ll often end up with non-aligned pixel blocks, much higher color depth, and so on.
I actually did some testing of spritesheeting with Nano Banana Pro a while back:
https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites
If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:
Exactly! On my tool I specifically use 4x4 grids which is limiting and I use canny edge maps to help enforce consistency. A very fun problem to solve!
Most of the purpose of pixel art is that it's hand crafted and every pixel matters. Not much point to pixel art if you drop that aspect.
I've been pretty happy with the little bits of AI pixel art I've generated. They bring my joy. So there's a point to it for me
This is 100% true for artists. But I am not an artist, and I like pixel art stylistically. So when I make sites or games, I need to either: use my bad art, hire someone on fiverr, or use AI.
Sorry, the point? isn’t the point of art pretty much what a person wants it to be?
Not OP and I won't dispute your point exactly but I'd like to point to a book called Pixel Logic wherein the author makes the same point regarding pixel art. Even though you'll be using stuff like the Lasso and Paint Bucket tools the big thing about pixel art is the manual control and precision of pixel placement (by hand) where you employ techniques like anti aliasing (again by hand). Advanced techniques like sub-pixeling when doing animation frames are another thing that makes sense only when you can place pixels one by one.
I have really struggled to get nano banana to follow size/proportion ratios for sprite art. any tips? I fed in a bunch of examples first and tried to write a really strict prompt. I wonder if any of the sw being discussed here can be programmatically controlled by claude code or similar to do sprite work
Like the comment above I split sprite sheets into grids with edges for NBP to follow. I have the option to add the canny edge map to the grid to enforce a lot of consistency as well. Then I specifically tailor the prompt to the task.
But even still it has issues sometimes.
The art on header of 8bitsmith.com looks bad. More than art, the animation is very janky.
Do you really just not get how you come off shilling this kind of stuff on a discussion talking about an aseprite fork?
The intersection of people interested in Aseprite and people wanting to just spawn this stuff out of thin air is fairly low!
That’s probably fair which is why I tried to be upfront that this is shilling. I figure some people might be like me, interested in sprites but not artsy enough to make them. You might start with an ai sprite and fix it via LibreSprite or another tool.
See also:
https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama
https://github.com/piskelapp/piskel
They're similar pixel art editor programs.
I always used MTPaint
https://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
I guess it's a bit old but it works reasonably well, and supports a lot of different file formats which is occasionally useful.
I've also used GrafX2 for this kind of pixelart work. It takes cues from old Amiga paint programs
Didn't know about Pixelorama, looks interesting.
Libresprite (since aseprite went evil) has been the only editor I can use for over a decade, glad there are others now.
They went evil? How? Folks always seem to like them
They turned proprietary. That's why libresprite exists.
Oh. So they're not actually hurting anybody, they're just offering goods for sale...
Evil is a strong word to use for offering goods for sale
There's an experimental android version too which is more than aseprite offers. For the basics libresprite is a great entry into pixel art
I love the MS-DOS feel to it. Many graphical tools used to have such UI flavour.
Weird mouse acceleration when it is over canvas and is replaced by crosshair icon.
What value is the license adding here? Sprite editors are never going to be enshittified, in fact I believe underfunding is more of a concern. I'd rather go with one that acknowledges this tension and promises sustainability like Aseprite, rather than one that undercuts that sustainability in favor of nominal openness.
Tried to run it on macOS but it crashed on boot. Looks cool!