Pixel Art Converter
Turn any photo into genuine retro pixel art: a real box-filter downscale plus nearest-color quantization onto a real Game Boy, CGA, PICO-8 or NES-inspired palette, with optional Floyd-Steinberg dithering.
Processed entirely in your browser — nothing you enter here is ever uploaded.
Result
About this tool
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.
Example. Quantizing to the Game Boy palette maps every downscaled pixel to the nearest of the four colors 0f380f, 306230, 8bac0f, and 9bbc0f.
Limit. The download is capped at 1024 pixels on a side, and the only palettes are Game Boy, CGA, PICO-8, and NES.