Good point.

GIMP's interface is apparently difficult to learn if you're used to PSP or Photoshop, but I picked it up very quickly since it was the first program I started using for "serious" graphics. Once you learn how to use it, it is a very powerful image editor, but it lacks the sheer number of built-in features that commercial programs have. However, it allows you to customize nearly everything very easily, and pretty much anything can be done with scripts. Textured backgrounds are easy to make with the wide range of filters available, provided you know what you're doing (color reduction can be painful, though). The only aspect of JJ2 tileset making I'd be uncomfortable with using GIMP for would be palettes; altering palettes in any way is painfully slow, and it maps colors to the nearest match in the palette, which is hell if you want two identical colors in different palette slots to get palette objects. Of course, you can easily work around that if you increase/decrease one of the RGB values by 1.

Paint Shop Pro is frankly an inferior program in general use, but it coincidentally has features that are extremely useful in making JJ2 tilesets, like that palette swap thingy. Not worth buying just for JJ2 tilesets, though.

Photoshop...as far as JJ2 tilesets go I don't think it really has any advantages over GIMP - if someone thinks of one, do tell me.

MS Paint, well, that one's kind of obvious. Sucks at pretty much everything, but if you're too lazy to learn to use a real graphics program I guess it'll do.



Blender is a generic 3D modeling program, and is easily on par with commercial programs. However, it has a reputation for being very difficult to learn. That said, once you do learn it you can do all sorts of great things very quickly. In the context of JJ2 tilesets you'd be using it whenever you want a 3D object - probably something in the background, or maybe a sucker tube. Of course, you need to wrangle the rendered object into your palette, not to mention getting the size right - I can't imagine a program that would make those any easier.
Of course, any 3D modeling you do for a JJ2 tileset will be very simple, so any program will do (but why pay for one when you can use the free Blender instead?).

TilesetPal is supposedly better than PalSuite, but neither one works perfectly under Wine. Editing the palette file in a text editor isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, but of course you still have to convert your image to the palette in an image editor - one of the many reasons I always try to get the palette before I draw much of anything.