Mihoshi20 said:
I use photoshop but only because I have photoshop and have used it a lot over many years but it's by far not the best and I would strong urge one to seek alternatives as I've also been doing that. The problem with photoshop is in it's name photo shop. It's not designed for pixel editing and it's very difficult to rig it into doing photo editing and also pixel editing with the same setup. The problem comes with the fact that photoshop hates hard edges of pixel. It always wants to 'feather' or blurr them. It's also not the best at resizing pixels either for the same reason. Even using 'nearest neighbor' it tends to distort pixels making them of varying sizes unless the image is exactly 1:1 and even then it's a gamble.
Long time ago. I'm talking Win98/early WinXP era I used a program called Paintshop Pro which was way better at handling pixels but I haven't used it since then so i can't recommend it these days either.
For what it's worth I am long time Corel Paint Shop Pro user and it's excellent for this type of use. You can easily turn off anti-aliasing and feathering by clicking on a checkbox on PSP's toolbar. It has features like pixel resize, color replacer tool, layers (just like Photoshop), create mockups using screen grabs from your emulator, use 8-bit text fonts, create custom color palettes, have a separate overview window, etc. It's also very affordable (no subscription based licensing like adobe uses). Worth checking out.