Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, native interface including support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and a lot more.

Layers and Filters

Take advantage of the flexibility layers provide when working with complex pixel art. Change opacities, blend modes, and more to compose creative effects. Use filters to adjust colors, create effects, and post-process your artwork.

Tools

Leverage Pixen's wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Brightness, Text, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse. You can even assign a different tool to the left and right mouse button. For example: pencil on the left; eraser on the right.

Color Palettes

With Pixen, you can add and organize commonly-used colors into palettes. Pixen can also import and export color palettes in the Adobe Color Table, Microsoft Palette, JASC Palette, and GIMP Palette formats. You can even perform palette operations such as sorting colors, removing duplicate colors, and more, directly in the app.

Animations

Create and arrange image frames in the filmstrip view to piece together animations. Pixen can import animations from animated GIFs, animated PNGs, and even sprite sheets! It can also export animations as animated GIFs, animated PNGs, movies, and sprite sheets.

Grid and Alignment Crosshair

Take advantage of Pixen's grid tools to guide you in placing pixels just where you want them.

Patterns

Define custom patterns to use while drawing with the Pencil, Line, or Eraser tool (instead of a single pixel).

Preview

While editing at high zoom levels, use the Preview feature to view the canvas scaled out. You can even play back animations and tile small images when working on patterns.

Custom Backgrounds

Pick a flat, striped, or checkered background to be drawn beneath the canvas. You can even set a reference image as a background.

iCloud Sync

Sync documents with Pixen for iOS over iCloud and resume your work right where you left off.

Sidecar Support

Pixen works great with Sidecar and Apple Pencil. You can even customize the double tap gesture.

Dark Mode

Focus on your content with Dark Mode in Pixen.

Full Screen

Work with all your favorite tools in full screen mode.

Hotkeys

Customize tool hotkeys to ease the transition from other image editors.

Wide Format Support

Export your artwork in PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, BMP, TIFF, SVG, and PSD file formats.

Sharing

Share your creations quickly and easily via AirDrop, Messages, email, and more!

15+ Year History

Pixen has been around for over 15 years as a native Mac app and we'd like to keep it that way.

Universal

Pixen is compatible with both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs and takes full advantage of what macOS has to offer.

Native Mac App

Pixen is carefully designed for the Mac and built with native technologies such as Core Animation, Core Image, AppKit, Auto Save, and Versions.

What's New

Pixen 6 is here with an improved design, new features, and many quality of life improvements.

  • Enjoy a refreshed design with support for macOS 26 and Liquid Glass with a new icon, updated controls, and menu icons
  • Turn Liquid Glass effects off or on under sidebars and toolbars independently in the Settings window
  • Create, sort, edit, and organize color palettes directly in the main document window
  • Speed up drawing symmetrical objects with the Mirror X / Mirror Y options for the Pencil tool
  • Use the new "Clone Layer to All Frames" command to propagate layer changes to all frames in an animation, perfect for updating a background that is shared across all frames
  • Hide the layers sidebar on the right to free up screen space
  • Use new keyboard shortcuts to bring up the Welcome window and color panel
  • Use new keyboard shortcuts for canvas rotation commands
  • Navigate to the previous/next row in color palettes using up/down arrow keys
  • Access the Trim Canvas command more easily

Pixen 6 also features many smaller quality of life improvements:

  • Improved the reliability of drag and drop operations in color palettes
  • Improved the default file name in the frame sequence export sheet
  • The last selected frame sequence image format is now remembered across exports
  • Fixed a bug where rotated images could end up being offset by an extra pixel
  • Fixed a bug where opening the background picker popover could select the wrong background
  • Pixen now warns when trying to export a project without adding export formats
  • Improved performance throughout the app, especially on older Macs