MotionShine01 / Crop
Fill the frame
Crop close to the subject first. At 32 or 48 pixels across, every pixel of the face or object counts.
Free tool
Pixel art converter, retro in one step.
Drop a photo, a logo or a drawing and it turns into pixel art: shrunk to a few dozen pixels across and painted with a small set of colours. Let it pick the best colours from your picture, or use a retro set like PICO-8 style or Game Boy style greens. Add dithering for shading, show the grid, and save a crisp PNG for a sprite, an avatar or a sticker.
Pixels
Colours
The pixel art is made in your browser. Your picture is never uploaded.
Tips
Better pixel art from a photo.
02 / Colours
Fewer is bolder
Four to eight colours look most like hand-made pixel art. More colours look like a blurry photo.
03 / Dither
For shading
The pattern dither gives the checker shading of old games; diffusion is softer for photos.
Questions
Good to know.
Why does the saved picture stay sharp?
Each pixel is enlarged into a square block with hard edges rather than smoothed, so 8× larger means every pixel becomes an 8 by 8 square. Choose "Actual pixels" for the tiny original to use in a game engine.
How are the best colours found?
The page groups the picture's colours into the number you choose (k-means clustering) and uses the middle of each group, so the main colours of your picture survive.
Can I use it for game sprites?
Yes. Use a picture with a see-through background, choose 16 to 64 pixels and save at actual pixels; the see-through parts are kept.
Can I edit the pixels after?
Not on this page. Open the PNG in a pixel editor such as Aseprite, Piskel or Photoshop with nearest-neighbour scaling.
Is my picture uploaded?
No. Everything happens in this tab.