Image to pixel art converter — palettes, dithering and clean export
Resample a picture down to a pixel grid, reduce it to a chosen palette and export it crisply at up to 16× — with no smoothing anywhere in the chain. Everything runs in your browser; the image is never uploaded.
Runs in your browser — your input is not uploaded to ToolsNow.
Your files are processed locally in your browser and are not uploaded to ToolsNow.
Reducing an image's resolution is not the same as drawing pixel art. Real pixel art is placed deliberately: every pixel is a decision, outlines are cleaned by hand, and colours are chosen to read clearly at a tiny size. What this tool does is resample and quantise — useful for a sprite base, a palette study, an avatar or a texture, and a genuinely good starting point to paint over. It will not invent the deliberate edges that make hand-drawn pixel art legible, and a photograph of a face at 32 × 32 will look like a smudge no matter which settings you pick, because there is not enough room for the features. Start larger than you think, and crop tightly. Images up to 50 megapixels (about 8000 × 6000). Larger files are refused rather than risking the tab being closed by the browser.
How to use
- Add an image. Drop a file, choose one, or press Ctrl/Cmd-V to paste a screenshot straight in.
- Pick a canvas size. Start at 64 × 64. Anything smaller needs a very simple, tightly cropped subject — a face at 32 × 32 has almost no room for features.
- Choose a palette. Reduce to a number of colours taken from the image itself, pick a hardware palette like the Game Boy or C64, or import your own hex list.
- Add dithering if the bands look harsh. Floyd–Steinberg keeps the most gradient detail; Bayer gives the regular retro crosshatch; Atkinson is crisper but blows out highlights.
- Adjust before you judge it. Raising contrast and saturation usually helps, because reducing the palette flattens both.
- Export at a multiple. Save at 1× for the true pixel data, or 8×/16× for something you can post without every viewer’s browser blurring it.
Questions
Does this make real pixel art?
No, and it is worth being straight about that. Hand-drawn pixel art is placed deliberately — outlines cleaned pixel by pixel, colours chosen so shapes read at a tiny size. This tool resamples and quantises, which is a different thing. It is genuinely useful as a base to paint over, for a palette study, for an avatar, or for a texture, but it will not invent the deliberate edges that make pixel art legible.
Why does my photo look like a smudge at 32 × 32?
Because there is not enough room. A 32 × 32 grid holds 1024 pixels in total, and a face needs its features to survive in maybe a dozen of them. Crop tightly to a single subject, raise the contrast, and start at 64 or 128 — you can always go smaller once you can see what is happening.
What does the dithering actually do?
When you cut the palette, each pixel has to move to the nearest available colour, and the leftover difference is an error. Dithering spreads that error across neighbouring pixels instead of throwing it away, so a gradient becomes a fine mix of two colours rather than a hard band. It trades smooth areas for texture, which is exactly the retro look people usually want here.
Why is my exported PNG blurry when I post it?
Because whatever is displaying it is scaling it up with smoothing. Export at 8× or 16× instead of 1×: the file then contains large hard-edged blocks that survive being resized. The upscale here is a pure block copy, so no new colours are introduced at any multiple.
Can I use my own palette?
Yes. Import a plain list of hex colours, a GIMP .gpl file, or a block of CSS custom properties. The colour palette tool on this site exports a file in exactly the right shape, so you can pull a palette out of one image and apply it to another.
Is transparency preserved?
Yes, and it is made fully opaque or fully transparent at a 50% cut-off rather than left partly see-through — a semi-transparent edge pixel is anti-aliasing, which is the thing this tool exists to remove. Turn the option off if you would rather have a solid image.
Are the built-in retro palettes accurate?
They are the documented colour sets of the hardware named, which are specifications rather than anyone’s artwork. Exact on-screen appearance varied a great deal between individual units and displays, so treat them as faithful to the specification rather than to your memory of a particular television.