Turning a photo into pixel art by hand takes hours of choosing colours and placing pixels. This converter does the heavy lifting: it reduces your photo to a small grid and a limited palette, cleans up noise, and hands you a crisp image you can refine pixel by pixel.
How it works
- Choose a photo. Pick, drop or paste an image; nothing is uploaded.
- Set the size and colours. Width in pixels and the maximum number of colours, from 2 to 64.
- Refine. Confetti cleanup, dithering, background removal, crop and brightness, contrast and saturation.
- Download. Pixel PNG at 1×, 8× or 16×, a chart PNG with grid, SVG or a .cpat project to keep editing.
Tips for great pixel art from a photo
Start small. Pixel art is about choosing what to keep. Begin at 32 or 48 pixels wide; if the subject is unrecognisable, step up gradually. A smaller grid almost always looks more like pixel art and less like a blurry photo.
Limit the palette hard. Eight to sixteen colours give the strongest pixel look. The converter picks the colours by clustering the photo in a perceptual colour space, so even a small palette keeps the most important tones.
Crop to the subject and remove the background. A face or a pet should fill the grid. Background removal leaves transparent pixels, ideal for avatars and stickers.
Boost contrast before converting. Small images lose subtle tonal differences. A little extra contrast and saturation helps features survive the reduction.
Choose dithering by style. Leave dithering off for clean, flat game-style art; use ordered dithering for a retro texture; use diffusion for photographic gradients such as skies.
Use exact colours for drawn art. If your source is already a drawing or a logo with flat colours, turn on Preserve exact colours so each colour maps to one palette colour without averaging.
Finish by hand. Press Edit to add a one-pixel outline, sharpen the eyes or remove stray pixels. The best pixel art is usually converted first and finished by hand.
Make it physical
The same grid can become a real object: switch craft to fuse beads, cross stitch or brick mosaic and get colour codes and counts for your pixel art.
What you get
| Sizes | 8–256 pixels wide from a photo; editor up to 2,000 × 2,000 |
|---|---|
| Colours | 2–64, matched by CIEDE2000 colour difference |
| Palettes | Free colour (RGB) |
| Downloads | PDF (cover, colour key, numbered chart pages, optional colour pages), PNG, SVG, shopping list CSV, .cpat project |
| Files accepted | JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF, iPhone HEIC; .cpat and OXS patterns; PDFs made by CraftPatterns |
| Privacy | Runs in your browser. Images are never uploaded. |
| Price | Free — no sign-up, no watermark |
How it compares with other free tools
What you can expect here, every time — no tiers, no trial.
| Free printable PDF | Yes, with no watermark |
|---|---|
| Sign-up needed | No |
| Image uploaded to a server | No — processed on your device |
| Editor | Yes — pencil, fill, line, rectangle, mirror, undo |
| Progress tracker | Yes — free, works offline |
| Switch the same pattern to another craft | Yes — one tap |
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The conversion runs in your browser and the photo stays on your device.
How is this different from just shrinking the image?
Shrinking keeps thousands of colours and soft edges. The converter reduces the picture to a small, deliberate palette chosen by colour clustering in a perceptual colour space, cleans up stray pixels and gives every pixel one flat colour, which is what makes it look like pixel art.
What size should I choose?
32 to 64 pixels wide gives the classic look for portraits and avatars; 96 to 128 keeps more detail for landscapes. Sizes from 8 to 256 pixels wide are supported.
Can I keep the background transparent?
Yes. Choose a background removal option in the advanced settings; removed pixels are transparent in the Pixel PNG.
What does dithering do?
Ordered dithering adds a regular checker texture typical of retro graphics; diffusion dithering scatters pixels to suggest smoother gradients. None keeps flat areas of colour.
How do I get a sharp PNG?
Use Pixel PNG at 8× or 16× in the downloads. Each pixel becomes an exact square block, with no blur.
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