Turn any photo or picture into retro pixel art: chunky pixels and a classic console palette (NES, Game Boy, CGA, C64, PICO-8) or an automatic palette drawn from the photo itself.
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This is a pixel art generator for photos: drop a picture on the page and it comes back looking like it was drawn for a video game console from the 1980s. Call it an 8bit converter, an 8-bit filter, a retro effect, a pixel art maker or creator - the job is the same two steps. First the image is averaged into chunky blocks, the size you set with the Pixel size slider. Then every block's color is snapped to a limited palette: a real console palette like the NES or Game Boy, a grayscale ramp, or an automatic palette built from the photo's own colors. The preview follows every control live, so you drag until the picture reads as pixel art rather than guessing at settings.
It works on any photo, portrait, screenshot, logo or drawing, as JPG, PNG or WebP. A face keeps enough detail to be recognisable down to surprisingly few blocks, which is why an 8-bit portrait makes such a good avatar or profile picture, and a logo turns into crisp pixel art in one click because it has few colors to begin with.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, or paste it from the clipboard. Pick a palette, then pixelate the photo by dragging Pixel size until the blocks look right - 8 is a good start, higher is chunkier - and toggle Dithering if you want the classic shaded look. Hold the compare button to check against the original, then download. The file saves as PNG by default, which keeps the pixel edges perfectly hard; the format menu also offers JPG and WebP if you need a smaller file.
Each palette in the list is the real thing, used whole. NES is the Nintendo Entertainment System's 55-color master palette, the default here and the most versatile: enough hues for skin, sky and foliage while still unmistakably 8-bit. Game Boy is the famous four shades of green - everything becomes a moody monochrome that reads instantly as 1989. CGA is the 16 colors of early IBM PC graphics, heavy on bold cyan and magenta. C64 is the Commodore 64's palette of muted browns, blues and greys, warmer and softer than the others. PICO-8 is the modern fantasy console's carefully balanced 16 colors, the palette most of today's indie pixel art is drawn in.
Two more options round it out. Auto builds a palette from the photo itself: the tool measures which colors the image actually uses and picks the best set of them, with the Colors slider deciding how many, from 2 up to 64. Grayscale replaces color entirely with an even ramp of greys - set Colors to 2 for pure 1-bit black and white, or 4 for the 2-bit look of early handheld screens. A small strip under the menu always shows the exact swatches in use, and for Auto it updates live as you change the image or the settings.
Real console games could not fade smoothly from one color to the next, so artists faked gradients by interleaving two palette colors in fine checker patterns. The Dithering toggle does exactly that, using an ordered Bayer pattern - the same regular matrix the old hardware era actually used - rather than modern error-diffusion dithering, which looks noisy and un-retro on big blocky pixels. With dithering on, a sky fades through neat cross-hatch steps instead of hard bands. It matters most on small palettes: on the Game Boy's four greens or a 1-bit black and white it is the difference between a silhouette and a picture.
The Boost slider is the seasoning on top. Retro graphics were punchy, so a straight conversion of a modern photo tends to look washed out; Boost raises contrast and saturation together before the colors are quantised. The default of 33 matches what the classic look wants, 0 converts the photo exactly as it is.
The tool computes one small grid of quantised blocks, and both the preview and the download are sharp upscales of that same grid. Nothing is recomputed at a different scale behind your back, so the downloaded file has exactly the blocks, colors and dither pattern the preview showed, at the full resolution of the image you loaded. The upscale is done with image smoothing disabled - nearest-neighbour, in editor terms - so every pixel edge stays perfectly hard instead of going blurry.
The pixel grid is also resolution-independent: Pixel size 8 gives the same number of blocks across a phone snapshot and a 40-megapixel photo, so a setting you like carries over between images. Transparency survives too - a PNG with a transparent background keeps it, with clean hard edges around the shape.
Everything runs in your browser through the canvas API. The photo is never uploaded, there is no signup and no watermark, and the page keeps working offline once loaded. For neighbouring effects, there is a grayscale converter with seven weighting methods, a threshold tool for hard black and white cutoffs, a film grain tool for analog texture, and a negative effect for inverted colors.
Open the photo here, pick a palette and drag the Pixel size slider until the blocks look right. The preview updates live. Then press Download and you get the pixel art version at the image's full resolution, no account and no watermark. The whole conversion happens in your browser - the photo never leaves your device.
It sets how chunky the blocks are. At 8, the long side of the image becomes 128 blocks - a classic console feel; at 2 you get a fine 512-block grid, and at 32 an extreme 32-block mosaic. The count is the same whatever the image's resolution, so the same setting gives the same look on a small screenshot and a huge photo.
NES is the best all-rounder for photos - 55 colors covers skin and sky while staying clearly retro. Game Boy turns anything into four shades of green, great for portraits and moody shots. PICO-8 is the modern indie pixel art look, CGA and C64 are for deliberately early-PC aesthetics. If you want the pixelation but with colors true to your photo, use Auto, which builds the palette from the image itself.
Dithering interleaves two palette colors in a fine checker pattern to fake the shades the palette does not have - the way real console artists drew gradients. Turn it on for photos with smooth skies or soft shadows, and for small palettes like Game Boy or 1-bit black and white, where it recovers a lot of detail. Leave it off when you want large flat areas of solid color, closer to a cartoon or logo style.
Yes. Choose the Grayscale palette and set Colors to 2 for 1-bit black and white - every block becomes either pure black or pure white, and with dithering on you get the classic newspaper halftone feel. Colors at 4 gives the 2-bit grey look of early handheld and Mac screens. If you want a threshold with a movable cutoff instead of a pixel grid, the black and white threshold tool does that at full resolution.
Yes, as a side effect, but note that bit depth and 8-bit style are different things. "8-bit depth" means each color channel is stored with 8 bits, which is the standard for JPG and most PNG files - every file this tool saves is 8 bits per channel, so loading a 16-bit PNG and downloading it here genuinely produces an 8-bit-depth file, the same conversion Photoshop does via its Image menu. The visible retro effect, though, comes from the pixelation and the limited palette, not from the channel depth.
The 16-bit generation - SNES, Mega Drive - used smaller pixels and far more colors on screen. Recreate it by lowering Pixel size to 3 or 4 and choosing Auto with the Colors slider up at 48 to 64: you get a finer grid and a richer palette that reads as 16-bit rather than 8-bit. The NES palette with big pixels sits firmly in the 8-bit era.
Pixel art is exactly what JPG compression is worst at: its soft, lossy encoding smears ringing artifacts around hard block edges. PNG stores the sharp edges and flat colors losslessly, usually in a small file because so few colors are left. The format menu still offers JPG and WebP if you need them - for counting how many colors the result really has, there is a color counter.
No. The image is decoded, pixelated, quantised and re-encoded entirely in your browser, at preview and at download alike. Nothing is transmitted anywhere, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page is open.