Pixelate Image & Pixel Art Converter
Turn a photo into chunky pixels or real pixel art. Choose the block size, reduce the colours or apply a retro palette such as Game Boy, NES or PICO-8, add dithering and download a crisp PNG.
How to use the Pixelate Image & Pixel Art Converter
- Open an image by dropping it on the box or clicking to choose it.
- Set the block size. Bigger blocks give a stronger mosaic; for pixel art try 4 to 12 px.
- Pick a palette. Keep the original colours, reduce them automatically, or choose a retro palette.
- Turn on dithering for smoother gradients with few colours, and grid lines if you want to see the pixel grid.
- Download PNG at the original size or as tiny pixel art with one pixel per block.
Retro palettes included
| Palette | Colours | Origin | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game Boy | 4 | The green LCD of the original 1989 Nintendo Game Boy | Nostalgic, monochrome-style art |
| NES-style | 55 | Approximation of the Nintendo Entertainment System palette | Colourful 8-bit scenes and sprites |
| PICO-8 | 16 | The fixed palette of the PICO-8 fantasy console | Modern indie pixel art |
| CGA | 16 | IBM Color Graphics Adapter (1981) full text-mode palette | Early PC and DOS-game look |
| Grayscale | 2–64 | Evenly spaced grey levels | Black-and-white photo effects |
| Black & white | 2 | Pure black and white | 1-bit art, stencils, with dithering |
Choosing a block size
The block size sets how many original pixels become one “pixel” of the result. Divide the image width by the block size to get the width of your pixel art: a 640 px wide image with 8 px blocks becomes 80 pixels wide, a typical size for a game character or a small scene. Classic sprites are tiny: 8 × 8 and 16 × 16 pixels were common on 8-bit consoles, and 32 × 32 on later systems. For a recognisable portrait try 48 to 96 pixels across; for a strong censor effect use blocks of 5% or more of the image width.
How colour reduction works
- Averaging: each block becomes the average red, green and blue value of the pixels inside it.
- Median cut: all block colours start in one box in RGB space. The box with the widest colour range is split at the median along that channel, and this repeats until there are as many boxes as colours you asked for. Each box’s average becomes a palette colour.
- K-means: starting from the median-cut palette, each block is assigned to its closest palette colour, then each palette colour moves to the average of its blocks. A few rounds of this reduce the overall colour error.
- Nearest colour: each block is drawn with the palette colour that has the smallest RGB distance √(ΔR² + ΔG² + ΔB²).
Dithering explained
With only a few colours, smooth gradients turn into hard bands. Floyd–Steinberg dithering fixes this by passing each block’s rounding error to the neighbours that have not been processed yet, using the weights below (★ is the current block):
| ★ | 7/16 | |
| 3/16 | 5/16 | 1/16 |
The eye blends the resulting dot patterns, so a 4-colour Game Boy image can still suggest dozens of shades. Dithering looks best with small blocks and few colours; turn it off for flat cartoon-style art.
Frequently asked questions
How does pixelation work?
The image is divided into square blocks of the size you choose, and each block is filled with the average colour of the pixels inside it. Blocks at the right and bottom edges may be smaller if the image size is not a multiple of the block size.
What is the difference between Keep original size and Tiny?
Keep original size outputs an image with the same dimensions as your photo, made of large blocks. Tiny outputs one pixel per block, which is true pixel art you can edit in a pixel editor or scale up later with nearest-neighbour resizing.
What do median cut and k-means do?
Both choose the best set of colours for your image. Median cut repeatedly splits the colours into boxes at the median and is fast. K-means starts from that result and moves each palette colour to the average of the pixels assigned to it, which usually matches the image a little better.
What is Floyd–Steinberg dithering?
When a pixel is replaced with the nearest palette colour, the colour error is passed on to the neighbouring pixels (7/16 to the right and 3/16, 5/16 and 1/16 to the row below). The resulting pattern of dots simulates colours that are not in the palette, which is how classic games showed smooth gradients.
Are the retro palettes exact?
Game Boy, PICO-8 and CGA use their well-known published colour values. The NES palette is a commonly used approximation, because the real console produced colours from an analogue signal that looked different on every TV.
Why is the PNG output file so small?
Pixel art has large areas of identical colour, which PNG compresses very well, especially with a reduced palette. The PNG is lossless, so no detail is lost.