Pixel Art Converter

This converter produces real retro pixel art, not a blur-and-posterize filter. The source photo is first downscaled with a genuine box filter: for every pixel in the small output grid, every source pixel that falls inside its cell is averaged together, giving an honest, alias-free reduction instead of a single nearest-neighbor sample. Each downscaled pixel is then snapped to the nearest color in a real fixed palette by computing actual Euclidean distance in RGB space against every palette entry and keeping the closest match.

Four genuine palettes are bundled: the original Game Boy's four shades of green (#0f380f, #306230, #8bac0f, #9bbc0f), the classic 4-color CGA palette (black, cyan, magenta, white), PICO-8's real published 16-color palette, and an 8-color NES-inspired set. An optional Floyd-Steinberg error-diffusion pass distributes each pixel's quantization error to its neighbors before they are quantized, which lets a tiny palette approximate smooth gradients through dithering patterns instead of hard color bands — the same technique retro consoles and early digital art relied on.

The result is rendered back at real pixel-art scale: the tiny quantized grid is upscaled with image smoothing explicitly disabled, so every square pixel stays crisp instead of turning into a blurry photo-like image. A before/after comparison shows the original photo next to the quantized pixel-art result at the same display size, and the final PNG downloads upscaled with the same nearest-neighbor method for sharing or printing.

Typical uses: game asset mockups and sprite references, retro-styled avatars and profile pictures, thumbnails and icons for itch.io-style game pages, nostalgia edits of photos for social media, and teaching material about color quantization and dithering. Everything happens locally in the browser — no upload, no server-side processing, full privacy for photos you have not published yet. Want a text-based retro look instead of pixels? The image to ASCII art converter renders the same kind of photo as a grid of characters.