asesprite is great. i don't recommend fire alpaca for animating or anything like that but for spriting its pretty decent. and its free. clip studio is good but i personally hate doing pixel art on there. the lines are pretty jaggy and difficult to control. my utmost TOP NUMBER 1 software for pixel art is Paint tool sai lol. Which is.... also "free". if you can find it lol.

but yeah fuck photoshop.