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How do people make the old style retro graphics used in platformers. Ones like these:





What software do you use? are they hard to make?
any help will be appreciated.

The space ship can be done in MsPaint/Photoshop (Search Gimp for free alternative). Google pixel art for tips on how to do it. The trick is to basically zoom in and work with one pixel at a time to start off with. The smaller the sprite the easier it is to draw.

The explosion again can be done in Photoshop/Gimp. Jump create a set of simple round puffy cloud brushes (google it), build up the explosion using those brushes with the paintbrush tool and dif variations of opacity/flow. Use the dodge and burn tool to bring out highlights/shadows and then colour burn a yellow/orange centre, playing with levels/curves to get the contrast right. Bit tricky if you have never used photoshop/gimp before. Look up tutorials on creating clouds, an explosion is basically the same thing.

Its not quite the same thing but you can see what I mean. Here is something I did a while back using a similar technique


You last image is actually a render of a 3D terrain with the camera flat on the ground pointing to one side. You can do this in Photoshop but again unless you know what your doing I wouldn't even attempt something so detailed. To do something like that you would want to have at least 3 layers fading into the horizon, then you would use selection of brushes to bring out the rocks using 2/3 colours and paying attention the light source. Use a smudge tool with a chalk brush to drag the colours into each other creating peaks and cliff faces etc. You could then displace the image to create more of a rocky texture. Then clean up and use the burn tool to bring out the shadows and dodge tool to highlight edges.


Edit
Just saw this on the forums
A free terrain generator. So you can make the last image relatively easy for free. http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=2

So you can just save .bmp and then touch them up in photoshop or use them as is.
It does work

I couldn't find the export bmp so I just took a screen dump,
flipped the image so its seamless and then blurred the edges.
(for some reason the image has been cropped and you cant see the end of it, I might of cocked it up when scaling)

Nice response DsarchyUK, just the sort of advice I wish we saw more of here.

Alongside Photoshop and PSP9, for sprite work I quite like PSP3. It's old as heck and not exactly pretty, but for pure sprite editing it's great. I used to re-touch complex engineering drawings with it, like scan them in then make the lines grey, then draw over the top in black. A very fiddly and time consuming job but PSP3 and it's simple tool set made it quick and easy - just be sure to save often, and be prepared for 8 character file names (yes it really is that old).

Here's a link to the downloads, they are far more demo like after v3, which is totally unrestricted. It seems that version 3, 6, and 9 of PSP are the best, the in-betweeners always felt flawed to me, especially v5.

http://www.oldapps.com/Paint_Shop_Pro.php