Image to Pixel Art Converter
Turn any image into pixel art in your browser, in the colors of a real console or your own game's palette. Download the sprite at its exact pixel size for a game engine, or enlarged with crisp pixels for sharing.
Drop a picture here
or paste with Ctrl+V. A photo, a drawing, or a character on a transparent background.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your images are never uploaded to a server.
How it works
- Drop in a picture. A character already cut out on a transparent background works best for sprites.
- Choose how many pixels wide it should be. 16, 32 and 64 are classic sprite sizes; larger keeps more detail.
- Pick a palette: the best colors for the picture, a SNES or Genesis style color space, a fixed palette like Game Boy or PICO-8, or paste your own game's hex codes.
- Add dithering if gradients look banded, and raise Punch if the colors look muddy.
- Download the sprite at its exact size, the enlarged version for sharing, or the palette itself.
Common use cases
- Making sprites, portraits or background art for a retro-style game.
- Converting concept art into your game's own fixed palette, so every asset matches.
- Turning a photo into a Game Boy-style picture for an avatar or a gift.
- Starting a pixel art piece from a reference photo, then cleaning it up by hand in an editor.
- Making a pixelated profile picture or stream emote.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I turn a picture into pixel art?
- Drop it in, choose a width in pixels and a palette. The picture is shrunk to that many pixels by averaging, then every pixel is moved onto the nearest color in the palette. Averaging first is what keeps edges clean; reducing colors at full size and shrinking afterward gives the smudgy look many converters produce.
- What size should a pixel art sprite be?
- 16 by 16 and 32 by 32 are the classic sizes for characters and tiles, and 64 is common for bigger characters or portraits. Pick the width here and the height follows the picture's shape; crop the picture square first if you want a square sprite. The download is exactly that many pixels, which is what a game engine or a pixel editor expects.
- Can I use my own game's palette?
- Yes. Choose Your palette and paste the hex codes, in any format and separated by anything, including straight from a Lospec page or a .hex file. Every pixel lands on one of your colors, so converted art matches everything else in your game.
- What do SNES style and Genesis style mean?
- Those consoles did not have one fixed palette. They showed a limited set of colors at a time, chosen from a larger color space: 32,768 colors on the SNES and 512 on the Genesis. These presets pick the best colors for your picture, as many as you allow, then snap each one to a color that machine could display. Genesis style looks punchier and more banded because its color space is so much smaller.
- Should I use dithering?
- For flat, clean sprites, usually not. Dithering mixes dots of two colors to fake a shade in between, which smooths gradients like skies and skin but adds noise to small sprites. Pattern gives the regular checkerboard look of older consoles; Diffusion gives softer, scattered dots.
- Does it keep transparency?
- Yes, and it makes it hard, which is what games need. Each pixel ends up either fully visible or fully transparent, with no half-transparent edge pixels. Both downloads are PNG, which keeps that transparency.
- How do I get the palette into Aseprite?
- Download the .gpl palette file and load it from Aseprite's palette options. The same file opens in GIMP and Krita. The .hex file is the plain one-code-per-line format Lospec uses.
- Is my picture uploaded?
- No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the picture never leaves your device. iPhone HEIC photos work too, and there is no signup or watermark.