@baldengineer you're gonna think I'm crazy, but Ms paint from the windows 3.1 era. Those old versions of mspaint let you fully control color depth down to black and white. If you're only doing 2-3 frames of animation, keep it simple. 👍
@baldengineer I was recommending MS-Paint because it can take a modern JPEG or TIFF and reduce the bit depth automatically when you specify it when saving as a bitmap. So you can start with a modern pre-existing image, crop, resize, save it as 8-bit or 16-bit or whatever, and now you have a great base image to edit anywhere you want.