Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint — almost always "DPaint" — was released in 1985 for the Amiga by Electronic Arts. It exploited the machine's palette and bitplanes to the full and handed pixel artists fills, gradients, symmetry and the famous stencil. Colour cycling let static images animate by rotating palette entries alone — waterfalls and starfields with not a single extra frame.

It saved images in the IFF format (LBM) and became a de facto standard: the whole games industry drew its sprites and backdrops in DPaint well into the 1990s, even when the art was headed for other platforms. A later PC version carried the legacy across. For the scene it was the tool behind countless graphics-competition entries.