Image to Pixel Art Converter

Turn any photo into 8-bit pixel art. Choose the block size, pick a retro palette, and export a sharp PNG or a true one-pixel-per-block sprite.

Drop an image to get started

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, or a screenshot. Processed on your device, never uploaded.

  • Never uploaded
  • Free, no signup
  • No watermark
  • Removes location data

How the converter works

The image is divided into a grid of square blocks, and every block is filled with the exact average color of the pixels inside it. Many tools take a shortcut and sample one pixel per block, which makes the result speckled and noisy. Averaging gives clean, stable blocks that look intentionally drawn.

If you choose a palette, each block's average is then replaced by the nearest color the palette allows. Matching uses a perceptual color distance rather than raw RGB math, so skin tones and skies land on the shade your eye expects.

Picking a palette

PICO-8

The 16-color palette of the PICO-8 fantasy console. It is bright and well balanced, with enough warm and cool tones for portraits and landscapes, and it is the most versatile starting point.

Game Boy

Four shades of green, matched by brightness, recreating the screen of the original 1989 handheld. It works best on photos with strong light and dark contrast.

CGA

Black, cyan, magenta, and white, the best-known palette of IBM PC graphics from the early 1980s. It is loud and stylised, and great for posters and album-art looks.

Grayscale and 1-bit

Eight even shades of gray, or pure black and white. 1-bit is ideal for stamps, stickers, and anything that will be printed in one color.

Getting a good result

  • Start with a clear subject. A face, a pet, or a single object on a plain background survives the reduction far better than a busy scene.
  • Crop first. Blocks are counted across the whole image, so cropping closer to your subject gives it more blocks and more detail.
  • Count blocks, not pixels. The readout under the image shows how many blocks wide the result is. Around 64 blocks gives a classic sprite look.
  • Export as PNG. JPG compression blurs block edges. PNG keeps them razor sharp.
Making game-ready sprites
Set Export to 1 px per block and download a PNG. You get an image where every block is exactly one pixel, ready for Aseprite, Unity, Godot, or any engine. When you scale it up, use nearest-neighbour filtering so the pixels stay crisp. The block size guide has more on choosing a resolution.

Frequently Asked Questions

Drop a photo into the converter above. Adjust the pixel size until the image is about 40 to 150 blocks wide, choose a palette such as PICO-8 or Game Boy, and download. Choose '1 px per block' under Export to get a true low-resolution sprite.

Think in blocks across, not pixels. Around 32 to 64 blocks wide gives a chunky sprite or avatar, 64 to 128 a classic 8-bit or 16-bit game scene, and 128 to 256 a detailed pixel illustration. The tool shows the current number of blocks across as you move the slider.

Instead of saving the image at its original size with large blocks, it saves one pixel for each block. A 1200px photo at block size 10 becomes a 120px sprite. That is the format game engines and pixel editors like Aseprite expect, and you can scale it back up with nearest-neighbour resizing without any blur.

Original colors, PICO-8 (16 colors), Game Boy (4 shades of green), CGA (black, cyan, magenta, white), 8-shade grayscale, and 1-bit black and white. Each block's average color is mapped to the closest palette color using a perceptual color distance.

Yes. There is no signup, no watermark, and no limit on images. Conversion runs in your browser, so your photos are never uploaded.

More free tools

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  • Blur Image

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