Hi, I’m new to Aseprite, but so far I’m loving it, and have found it very intuitive to use. But simple copy and paste operations are behaving very strangely for me.
All I want to do is copy pixels from one frame to another. Here’s my screen when I press Ctrl+C:
I then switch to frame 2, and press Ctrl+V. Here’s the result:
As you can see, only some of the pixels I wanted were actually copied. What am I getting wrong here?
I think this is a bug relating to palette management. Aseprite has a bad habit of assuming the first colour in your palette is transparent, even when it shouldn’t be.
Two workarounds:
A. Set your document to RGB instead of Indexed. Most of Aseprite’s tools still make it easy to keep your work restricted to your chosen palette, so using Indexed isn’t necessary unless you need it for technical reasons.
B. Add a transparent colour to your palette and move it to the first slot in the palette, so that Aseprite will use that as transparency instead of black.
That’s so weird–the second workaround fixed it for me! Thanks!
As for the first workaround, my image was already RGB, so I was having the issue/bug despite that.
Is this something I should make a bug report for? I’d love to help improve this awesome tool in some small way.
It is not bad habit, it is by design.
BraidAcer, it seems we replied at almost the exact same time. I’m surprised that this behavior is by design. When I create a new document, the first color in the palette is black by default. Doesn’t this mean that simple copy and paste operations, like the one I demonstrated above, will never work as expected in a new document, without first adding to the palette?
Again, I’m new to Aseprite, but if this is the way it’s supposed to work, it seems very counter-intuitive to me, especially compared with how easy the other features are to use. Please let me know if this is just a gap in my understanding.
Palette-based systems often use the first colour of the palette as transparent whenever transparency is appropriate (i.e. not the background layer), and Aseprite emulates this behaviour. The problem is that Aseprite isn’t always consistent about this (as seen in the fact that you have both black and transparent in your first image), and doesn’t indicate this in the UI in any way.