I dunno, just… Pixel-by-pixel ftw? xD At least with 2D sprites. Photoshop etc. is surely necessary for 3D textures and whatnot, and sometimes 2D backgrounds as well.
You can do pixel by pixel work in Photoshop, GraphicsGale and Gimp.
Paint is just too crippled to be useful.
Layers? animations? save you images as GIF or PNG? Logical keyboard shortcuts for every tool? Can you change them?
I can’t work with Paint. It makes me go bonkers and eat pets.
eat pets?
here, have my dog
I know who you are and what you are, and I didn’t say or mean to suggest that you’re a piece of crap, but Paint is not crap either way. Also, nationalism? 
The user can not be a piece of crap if he is a Swede. That’s just impossible. 
Anyway. I find Paint slow to work with. The keyboard shortcuts aren’t where I’m used to.
Paint will evolve a bit in Windows 7 but it will probably still be useless to me.
If the user isn’t a piece of crap, he can use the piece of crap (Paint) to create pieces of not-crap.
But Paint is still a piece of crap.
Paint is the only program any spriter with a brain will ever need. Other tools are only necessary to fulfill personal shortcomings.
Can the hotkeys of Photoshop be useful? Well, hell yeah. I use them all the time when PS is available to me. But everything that a sprite would ever need can be done easily in Paint, and no other program will ever be necessary.
For anything else, that’s another story, of course. Backgrounds, special effects, etc… Paint sucks hardcore. But the original post was about spriting, so my point stands in context.
A spriter with or without a brain needs to be able to save a file as a .gif or .png without killing the quality.
And most serious spriters need to animate.
Paint does PNG just fine, and there are plenty of free programs out there for animating that work side by side with Paint.
I use GraphicsGale, Pixen, Photoshop and ImageReady (I own a Photoshop 8 license. ImageReady came with Photoshop until CS2/v.9. Now it’s a part of Photoshop) when I create pixel art.
And no, I don’t use filters and brushes in Photoshop. Just look at my images.
The programs are good for different things. And Paint still sucks.
Paint is like licking battery acid for fun.
I did decide to give GraphicsGale a try recently, and I have taken a liking to it so far, though I save my gifs in GIMP (since I have the free edition). Is it worth buying the full version?
I think it is.
And I really like the onion skin feature (But I still animate in ImageReady. I must start to draw my animations in GraphicsGale sometime because that was the reason that I bought it.) and the batch conversion of images.
?16 isn’t much.
The main reason I’ve stuck to paint for so long rather than trying something else is that I couldn’t just simply draw another body piece, and copy it and drag it over to something without making a layer for it. >: | But GraphicsGale doesn’t really have that problem.
It’s not really an issue, or any sort of hindrance, I just find that in GIMP or Photoshop kind of annoying.
Well, I still have to in GraphicGale for some things, unless there’s a sort of “treat background color as transparency in this layer” button I don’t know about yet.
edit
Nevermind, I did just find that button. lol
if you open a PNG file that was saved in paint, then add another color, the output will have the added color missing
That used to tick me off in XP, but Vista’s paint doesn’t seem to do that. 
lol
I’ll purchase GraphicsGale later when I get further hang of it. It’s quite useful when working with GameMaker as well (since it can save animations into sheets).
That’s because Paint automatically indexes images if it can. And whenever you index an image in paint, it won’t go back to RGB color unless you do so in a program like GIMP.
You know, I’ve decided that GraphicsGale is worth purchasing. Animations that took me 2 days to do now take me 2-3 hours. >: |
Like I wrote before: I bought GraphicsGale to create animations. It’s easier and faster than in just about every other image editor.
I just hope I don’t get ripped off some how, but I shouldn’t, considering I’ve been to Canada and back and still used my card there. My only beef with the site is that it has a slight lack of information here and there.