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I'm kinda in the market for a new animation tool myself. I currently use beneton since it's very easy to use and I like that. I've heard good things about fireworks, is that worth looking into?

Awesome thread!

I mainly use Graphics Gale, Photoshop, and Gimp. GG for small sprites, Photoshop for large sprites, and Gimp for palettes.

I honestly never thought of using programs for animation since GG has an onion skin function. I say try fireworks to see how it feels.

Also found this another forum:
http://www.pixel.tools/

Seems very useful. I plan on getting it.

Speaking of GG, I was wondering if there's a better alternative since it has some issues.

I use Paint almost exclusively for making individual frames (I'm still in the middle of my first experiment with Gimp), and Falco Gif Animator for putting animations together. Falco provides you with relatively simple options for transparency, image speed, frame reorganization, etc and saves into more than just GIF. Copying and pasting frames in from something like Paint is easy, and when you start a new animation, the default dimensions are what you have copied (if an image, at least).

I don't think I've used anything else in my 3.5 years of spriting.

I use Paint.NET for everything except animating, which I use a website for.

I believe I have the most outdated set of programs used for spriting.

I mainly use 2002 XP MS Paint for making nearly all of my pixel art. I personally prefer this version of Paint more than Vista/7/8 since it's more simpler to use and not trying to be a water down Photoshop.

I use Photoshop 7.0 (not CS7) for minor things like color and pixel corrections. Nothing too major unless it's something that I can't do in Paint. For animating I use Adobe ImageReady. Never heard of it? Well it's because it was integrated into Photoshop after CS2. While it's a pain having to switch between Photoshop and ImageReady, it gets the job done.

I'm also a MS Paint user, however I use GIMP for transparencies. I can't honestly recall the last GIF I made it was so long ago, since the games I sprite for animate from frames for you.

I also use MS Paint for most of, my spriting needs and Photoshop for animating or for making any image(s) transparent when needed.

GIMP all the way for me.

+ Layers/Opacity
+ Built-in animation
+ Easy Index/RGB switching
+ History
+ Comfortable keyboard short cuts
+ Color inversion, brightness/contrast, colorize
+ Huge time savers like color selection, perspective and Iwarp

Most of the time I just use the color picker and pencil tools but those other things come in handy very often.

Edit: plus it's free.

MS Paint, pixlr.com/editor for transparency, layers, and other fancy stuff, and Game Maker for checking animations.

Fireworks exclusively.

Once you learn how to use Fireworks, you'll have no limitations. I personally draw my frames in mspaint and quickly copy them into Fireworks where I can place frames where I want, use onion skin to sketch my next frame out, make further edits, etc... Very good tool for animating sprites. To my knowledge there isn't anything that compares.

I use Paint.net for all my spriting work. Got to used to it xD
But I do use Fireworks when I'm animating in flash.

I use Paint.NET for spriting and IconLover from Aha-Soft for animating

How do you set up paint.net in order to make pixel art?

Photoshop Both for Spriting and Animating.