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How to erase exactly one pixel?


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I am trying to make a sprite using pixel art. However, it is very difficult to erase one pixel only as eraser damages pixels around and it takes multiple strokes to erase pixel. This leads to surrounding pixels having lighter colors when they shouldn't and I find myself frustrated redoing my work over and over again every time when I screw up. Is there a way to paint nothing? I know that you can pain over a bad pixel with white for example to fix a mistake however in this case pixel has to be empty and I can't seem to be able to find a way to do that. Thanks for your time. Any suggestions could help!

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The one-pixel basic brush works for me. Zoom in so that you can see the pixel squares clearly.

 

You need to be able to click without moving the cursor. This is easy to do with a trackball or a touchpad, but probably quite difficult with a mouse or a stylus.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Hello, pixel artist here, too. I've created one "New square brush" from the tiny icon in the right panel of the brushes, making it 1 pixel size, no spacing, full opacity flow and all...but yep, it's still not a hard pixel. Wanted to use it to associate it to the eraser. IMO, yep, do it old style. You can use the flood selector (or flood erase) later on to select in one go all pixels of the color of choice as background. Just set the wand to 0 tolerance, and contiguous or not depending on each case.You can do that just once, at the end when preparing the sprite to export !

 

Old sprite painters did work like this (deleting with background color). Actually, it was often done against a horrid full magenta quite disgusting to draw against it -kindda the chroma of the pixel artist back then- 

I'd just use it for export. My preference tend to be just white, even if used in some elements, I'd just be careful.

 

Just made a test now, as got curious, and well, seems quite workable if done as mentioned. Not sure if the top bar options of "foce pixel alignment" and "move by whole pixels" are beneficial or not (edit: yes it is)...Alt LMB drag to select color works pretty well at  this res, and also being so zoomed in, I don't see the trembling while drawing, so, funnily enough, pixel art is the only work I'd do in the painting area until the brush engine rewrite   :)

 

Is only at a zoom of 91% that it starts to do the trembling optimizing, so, from there to higher zoom (100%, 300, etc) you can work really well, that is, pixel art is comfortable to work here at any resolution/zoom of the needed ones ! :)

 

Some things: The flood fill with zero tolerance seems to work without adding any blurry aliasing. 

With lasso select, aliasing off for hard edges,  and shift you can make shapes formed by straight lines. Then shift + f5 to fill with a color.  Pen tool (which alows you to do vertical and 45º lines) wont work, as once you hit the convert to selection, no option to disable the smoothing, the aliasing.  A pitty, as the many premade vector shapes would allow to work faster.

 

Anyway, you can pixel push with whatever the utility, but what AP does, not found in most free or non expensive software (in high end stuff for print, etc) . So I prefer it so, as pixel art can be dealt as is, very well.

 

Edit: Also, just using the brush (the 1 pixel special brush) and shift, you will make lines (by clicking in origin and end). But no verticals and horizontals and 45º ones. The grid on can help you for making diagonals

 

And you can load an isometric grid in Snapping preferences.   :) (shift click works great for doing those 2 pixel steps diagonals)

(painted some pixels (below) and works quite well...)

 

post-31469-0-63640300-1480385230_thumb.png

 

And also, for a fast  eraser: make a 1 pixel marquee rectangle. Now position the selection by putting the cursor inside the selection and drag to move. Once over the needed pixel, hit "del" key. (and so on)

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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Hello, pixel artist here, too. I've created one "New square brush" from the tiny icon in the right panel of the brushes, making it 1 pixel size, no spacing, full opacity flow and all...but yep, it's still not a hard pixel. Wanted to use it to associate it to the eraser. IMO, yep, do it old style. You can use the flood selector (or flood erase) later on to select in one go all pixels of the color of choice as background. Just set the wand to 0 tolerance, and contiguous or not depending on each case.You can do that just once, at the end when preparing the sprite to export !

 

Old sprite painters did work like this (deleting with background color). Actually, it was often done against a horrid full magenta quite disgusting to draw against it -kindda the chroma of the pixel artist back then- 

I'd just use it for export. My preference tend to be just white, even if used in some elements, I'd just be careful.

 

Just made a test now, as got curious, and well, seems quite workable if done as mentioned. Not sure if the top bar options of "foce pixel alignment" and "move by whole pixels" are beneficial or not (edit: yes it is)...Alt LMB drag to select color works pretty well at  this res, and also being so zoomed in, I don't see the trembling while drawing, so, funnily enough, pixel art is the only work I'd do in the painting area until the brush engine rewrite   :)

 

Is only at a zoom of 91% that it starts to do the trembling optimizing, so, from there to higher zoom (100%, 300, etc) you can work really well, that is, pixel art is comfortable to work here at any resolution/zoom of the needed ones ! :)

 

Some things: The flood fill with zero tolerance seems to work without adding any blurry aliasing. 

With lasso select, aliasing off for hard edges,  and shift you can make shapes formed by straight lines. Then shift + f5 to fill with a color.  Pen tool (which alows you to do vertical and 45º lines) wont work, as once you hit the convert to selection, no option to disable the smoothing, the aliasing.  A pitty, as the many premade vector shapes would allow to work faster.

 

Anyway, you can pixel push with whatever the utility, but what AP does, not found in most free or non expensive software (in high end stuff for print, etc) . So I prefer it so, as pixel art can be dealt as is, very well.

 

Edit: Also, just using the brush (the 1 pixel special brush) and shift, you will make lines (by clicking in origin and end). But no verticals and horizontals and 45º ones. The grid on can help you for making diagonals

 

And you can load an isometric grid in Snapping preferences.   :) (shift click works great for doing those 2 pixel steps diagonals)

(painted some pixels (below) and works quite well...)

 

attachicon.giffast_iso.png

 

And also, for a fast  eraser: make a 1 pixel marquee rectangle. Now position the selection by putting the cursor inside the selection and drag to move. Once over the needed pixel, hit "del" key. (and so on)

 

 

Hi,

 

You should use the "Pixel Tool" for this - it's hidden behind the paint brush tool on the left.

 

You can set it up (using the context bar at the top) to accurately delete single pixels.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Andy.

 

 

The one-pixel basic brush works for me. Zoom in so that you can see the pixel squares clearly.

 

You need to be able to click without moving the cursor. This is easy to do with a trackball or a touchpad, but probably quite difficult with a mouse or a stylus.

 Thank you for your responses guys. I am sorry for not being clear  - I cannot figure out how to paint over with transparent color? I work quite a bit with transparent background and I cannot seem to figure out how to paint over with transparent instead of background color (selecting white circle with red line over does not help to paint over). Making a clipping mask and hiding stuff with black does work but thats annoying. :/ Eraser seems to do the trick but it is annoying as it does not erase pixel straight away.

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Ouch! Didn't know that...

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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On 29/11/2016 at 9:36 PM, Alfred said:

With the Pixel Tool selected, Ctrl-click where you want to erase a pixel.

 

 

On 29/11/2016 at 9:40 PM, SrPx said:

Ouch! Didn't know that...

 

I didn't know it either, until I selected the Pixel Tool and saw the words "DRAG+Ctrl to erase" on the hintline. It didn't take great powers of deduction to work out that Ctrl-clicking would erase the pixel under the cursor. :)

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Indeed, click shift for making lines, and drag shift to make vertical or horizontal lines are both very useful for pixel art, too. The picker works without issues or lag in this res and mode...ALT + RMB & LMB drag will increase only size, allowing you to fast cover areas with a big rectangle.... (aka manual fill / large brush) 

 

And you still have access to all painting modes with it (lighten, add, etc) which can be useful (at least to set your main tones, later on only to use a few colors only, if want to keep the usual pixel art rules ) Or even paint with opacity, if do a hard selection with all the pixels to not paint in the background and so avoid non 100% opaque pixels.  (again, without a controlled pallete, dithering, etc, wouldn't be pixel art)

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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  • 3 years later...
  • 8 months later...

Sorry for the necro, but for me ctrl-clicking with the pixel erases the pixel im pointing at (zoomed in quite far) and half of the adjoining pixels(how is that even possibnle). So basically 2 pixels. Set to 1px, 100% flow/opacity/hardness etc.

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Make sure you have Force Pixel Alignment set to ON and then make sure your layer is aligned to integer pixel values (the Navigator Panel will show this but you may need to change the number of decimal places in Preferences to see more places).
See attached video for a quick example of where things can go ‘wrong’, which is what I think you might be seeing.

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Sorry, what I meant by “aligned to integer pixel values” was that the X, Y, W and H values (in the Transform Panel) for the layer should all be whole numbers (integers) without any fractional part. In other words, for example, the X value should be 10.0 rather than 10.25.
The numbers in the Transform Panel (and elsewhere) sometimes show as integers even when the actual underlying values are not so you may need to go to “Preferences/User Interface” and change the number of decimal places to see if the values are actually integers or not, or you can type an integer value in manually.

(I submitted a feature request a while ago asking if we can have a visual ‘marker’ of some sort on these types of fields to show where the visible value is not the actual value.)

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Thanks for the reply. Been examining the problem a little more and I think it may have something to do with alignment. I'm looking at my drawing and if I show the pixel grid, it seems that my whole drawing is mis-aligned with it. Somehow. lol. So... yeah. Somehow my image is not "snapped" to the pixel grid, and I'm not sure how to make it so. I know it sounds nonsensical, and it really is. I've got "force pixel alignment on", and that doesn't seem to be helping.

EDIT: just before posting this comment I seem to have found the root of my problem. There is a button at the top called "Pixel view mode", which for reasons is not enabled by default in Pixel Edit mode. So.... yeah. Apparently I was in some alternate viewing mode all this time, as that button wasn't pressed. Having this enabled fixes the problem; the image's pixels are now properly aligned to the grid and the tools behave as they should. Thanks again for the help, I appreciate it! :)

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