Pixelate a photo into sprite-ready art

Reference photos become sprite bases by quantization: downscale hard, limit the palette, upscale crisp — no smoothing.

Tools used in this guide

The job

Pixel art isn't just small images — it's few colours at big pixels. The pipeline: downscale to the target pixel count (averaging, not sampling), cut the palette to N colours with median-cut, then upscale with nearest-neighbour so blocks stay sharp.

Three dials

Output width 8–512 pixels sets the resolution. Colour cap (up to 64) sets the palette depth — 16 is a classic constraint, 8 is hard mode. Download is the nearest-neighbour upscale of the small image.

  • The palette panel shows exactly which colours survived — that's your sprite's swatch set.
  • Faces need more colours than sprites do; at 16 colours a photo portrait is impressionist, which is often the point.

Honest scope

Median-cut is a real quantizer, not a fancy one — it picks popular colours, not perceptually-optimal ones. For serious sprite work, treat the output as a base to hand-edit. Input limit 40,000,000 pixels.