Pixel Art Converter

How to use the Pixel Art Converter

1. Drop a picture onto the box, click to choose a file, or press Try an example picture.
2. Set Pixels wide. Smaller means blockier: 16–32 for icons and sprites, 48–96 for portraits and scenes. The height follows the picture’s proportions.
3. Choose a palette. Adaptive picks the best colours for your picture; the other sets give a retro, monochrome or pastel look. Maximum colours reduces the palette further.
4. Try dithering for smooth gradients, make a plain background transparent, and adjust brightness, contrast and saturation.
5. Pick a download size and press Download PNG. The image is enlarged in whole-number steps without smoothing, so every pixel stays a sharp square.

How the conversion works

The picture is first shrunk to the number of pixels you asked for. Each new pixel is the average of the block of original pixels it replaces, which keeps shapes recognisable. Then every pixel is matched to the nearest colour in your palette using a perceptual colour difference (CIEDE2000), and the result is shown enlarged with hard edges so you can judge it as pixel art.

Because the whole picture is averaged, very thin lines (hair, whiskers, text) can fade at small sizes. Increase the width, raise the contrast, or touch the picture up in an image editor before converting.

Pixel size cheat sheet

Palettes in this tool

All palettes here are generic. They are not copies of any game console’s or computer’s official colours.

Why downloads are enlarged in whole steps

A 48-pixel-wide image is tiny on screen, so most people want it bigger. If you enlarge it with ordinary smoothing, the pixels blur. This tool enlarges by whole numbers (4×, 8×, 10×…) using nearest-neighbour copying, which turns each pixel into a sharp block. For game engines and design apps choose 1× — true pixel size and scale it there with “point” or “nearest” filtering.

Downloads are limited to 4,096 pixels on the longest side to keep the file and your device’s memory manageable.

Dithering, transparency and cleaner results

• Dithering spreads the colour error between neighbouring pixels, which imitates shades with a small palette. It suits gradients such as skies; turn it off for flat artwork.
• Transparent background removes a plain background connected to the picture’s edges. Raise the tolerance if some background remains; lower it if the subject starts to disappear.
• Fewer colours gives a stronger style. Try 6–8 colours for a graphic look and 16–32 for a softer one.
• Contrast and saturation sliders help pictures that look flat after reduction.

From pixel art to beads or stitches

A pixel picture is also a pattern. To build it from fuse beads, open the bead pattern generator; for needlework use the cross stitch pattern generator. Both add colour lists with counts. If you only need the colours of a picture, the palette extractor lists them as hex codes.

Frequently asked questions