Troubleshooting & FAQ

The most common Pixel Art Studio problems have a small set of causes, and the ones that come up repeatedly are below. If your problem isn’t here, the Guides hub and the Editor reference cover the controls themselves.

Fill tool floods the canvas

The Fill tool fills every pixel that matches the one you clicked, within Tolerance. If your outline isn’t a fully closed loop, the fill escapes through the gap and covers the layer.

Undo with Ctrl+Z, then inspect the outline. The most reliable fix is to switch to the outline layer, zoom in with Ctrl+=, and trace the perimeter until you find the open pixel. Close it, switch back to the layer you want to fill, and try again.

If the fill is spreading further than you expect even with a closed outline, the Tolerance is probably too high; lower it toward 0 for an exact-color match.

Visible tile seams

A tile is seamless only when its edges line up with its own repeats. The right edge has to connect to the left, and the bottom to the top. If you drew the tile without checking the repeats, seam pixels are almost certainly misaligned.

The fix is Tiled Preview, in Tool Options, which repeats the canvas in every direction while you draw. Turn it on before you start the tile, not after. If the tile already exists, turn Tiled Preview on now and edit the edge pixels until the grid lines disappear. The full workflow is in Build a seamless tileset.

GIF color banding

GIF is limited to 256 colors and binary (on/off) transparency. A pixel art piece with subtle shading or a long gradient ramp will band, and partial transparency renders as fully opaque or fully transparent.

GIF is for previews and marketing placeholders, not for game assets. If the destination is a game engine, export a sprite sheet or PNG sequence instead. If you must use GIF, simplify the palette first so the 256-color limit is not the cause.

Blurry exported PNG

Pixel Art Studio exports hard pixel edges using nearest-neighbour scaling, so a blurry PNG almost always means the destination app is resampling the image, not the export.

Export at the size you actually need (use the Scale option, 1x for raw pixels or 2x/4x for delivery) rather than scaling up in the destination. If the destination insists on its own resizing and you can’t disable it, export at the exact pixel dimensions it consumes.

Wrong version restored

Version History has two sections: Auto-saves and Published. Restoring either replaces the current project state, and the restore is reversible because the state you just left is itself auto-saved shortly after.

Open Version History again, find the state you actually wanted, and restore it. If you’ve been working for a while since the wrong restore, the state before your restore is in the auto-save list. See Version history and publishing for the full mechanics.

Tool switched unexpectedly

S does two jobs. With a drawing tool active it switches to the Spline/Curve tool; while animation is playing it solos the selected layer. If you tapped S expecting a curve and a layer soloed instead, you were mid-playback.

Pause playback with Space first, then press S to switch tools. Details are on the Keyboard shortcuts page under “A note on S”.

Asset palette mismatch

Assets from the Asset Store come with their own colors. Dropped into a piece with a tighter palette, they stand out.

After placing the asset, recolor it to fit. Use Hue/Saturation for a broad shift, or select matching colors with the Magic Wand and Fill them with palette colors. Placing the asset on its own layer first makes this far easier, because you can isolate and recolor without disturbing the rest of the art.

Slow save or export

Canvas size, frame count, and layer count all multiply together, so a 256×256 project with 36 frames and six layers per frame is a large document. Save and export times scale with that.

If a single project is very large, consider splitting it. A character with eight directional animations is often cleaner as separate projects per direction, exporting each as its own sheet, rather than one project holding everything. Onion skinning with a high frame count and high opacity also makes the canvas visually heavy; tune the counts and opacity in Settings.

Image import

Pixel Art Studio is set up to build pixel art from within the editor and to place assets from the in-product Asset Store. Whether it can import an arbitrary external image as a starting point isn’t documented here yet. Check the in-app tool rail and Asset Store for an import action, or stage a screenshot of an existing image and trace it on a reference layer.

Other issues

If a control isn’t behaving the way its docs describe, the Editor reference and Tools reference are the canonical descriptions of what each button and tool should do. Discrepancies often come from the active context: a tool’s options only show when that tool is selected, and several keys (notably S) behave differently depending on whether animation is playing.