LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor | Hacker News Reader

LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor

libresprite.github.io

287 pointsnicoloren92 comments

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 such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers

It’s also really cheap!

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.

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

You are right. I've been corrected. I misunderstood their licence to be on the distributable, not the source. I'll take my misunderstanding home now.

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.

You are describing source available. That is not the same as open source.

Thanks, I see my mistake! Can't correct my post but I'll take this into future thinking.

Source available is not open source. Don’t try to redefine what open source means. It’s so insulting to volunteers hard work.

Apologies to every OSS contributor for my misunderstanding then.

I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.

didn't even realize Aseprite is source available!

I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.

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!

https://www.stef.be/dpaint/

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...).

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.

It does not have non-destructive editing layers, color correction layers, indexed palette, posterization, as in Gimp or Krita,

it does not have the ability to draw with higher resolution brushes for subsequent resolution reduction, etc.;

it does not have shader graphs, as in Blender, Pixel Composer, PixelOver;

it is difficult to draw in an indexed palette, unlike PixiEditor,

you can't take 3D renderers and transform them into pixel art, like in PixelOver or Blender,

and there's no bone animation for 2D, like in Spine.

Aseprite is a good editor if you like to paint pixel by pixel every frame without using the advancements and workflows that other style designers and artists use, but calling it the best would be an exaggeration.

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.

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.

That's like asking a EU product to not be named Euro-{product}.

Also cringe and tainted.

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.

To me that sounds awesome

   func RebootItAll()

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

TIL it's 'bruh'. Until today I thought it was 'bray'

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.

At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)

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".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

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...

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 ..

Hey, no terminal shaming here!

Apologies, not my intention ..

"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.

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.

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.

I kind of agree. When nothing's Libre, naming your project Libre<something> is fine, I believe. But imagine OSS succeeds, and everything is named Libre<something>. Then that's terrible.

"Did you open libreterminal and use librels and libreget to download librebrowser to open libresearch?"

It lacks identity (just a little bit is fine) and distinctiveness, imo.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

https://github.com/jenissimo/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!

The art on header of 8bitsmith.com looks bad. More than art, the animation is very janky.

Thanks for your opinion

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.