Turn Any Image into Retro Pixel Art
Free image to pixel art converter. Apply authentic retro palettes and Floyd-Steinberg dithering with crisp PNG export.
RETRO CONTROLS
HOW TO CONVERT ANY IMAGE TO PIXEL ART
Create authentic 8-bit, 16-bit, and retro arcade pixel illustrations in three effortless steps.
Upload or Pick a Sample
Drag and drop any PNG, JPG, or WebP photo, selfie, illustration, or game asset into the browser.
Select Palette & Dithering
Adjust the pixel grid scale, choose classic palettes (GameBoy, Pico-8, NES), and toggle Floyd-Steinberg dithering.
Export Crisp HD PNG
Download crisp, pixel-perfect PNG files at up to 8x resolution, or export color swatches (.GPL) directly to Aseprite.
WHY PIXKIT CREATES REAL PIXEL ART
Most standard online tools merely reduce image dimensions, producing dirty, blurry color artifacts that look like low-quality compression rather than genuine retro pixel art.
PixKit applies perceptual Euclidean color distance mapping combined with error diffusion dithering. This forces every single pixel into a deliberate, restricted palette—emulating the exact hardware constraints of legendary consoles like the GameBoy and Famicom.
Client-Side Engine
Real-time HTML5 Canvas processing
Local Processing
Runs directly inside your web browser
Featured Retro Hardware Palettes
The iconic greenish DMG monochrome LCD display palette.
Carefully balanced palette optimized for retro sprites and characters.
High-contrast synthwave aesthetic with electric violet, hot pink, and cyan.
FEATURED RETRO GUIDES & DEEP DIVES
Explore the mathematics, hardware memory architectures, and color quantization principles powering authentic retro graphics.
Dithering: How 1-Bit Screens Showed Us Grayscale
Understand how 2D error diffusion matrices, the Atkinson filter, and serpentine rasterization simulate continuous tone gradients on restricted hardware palettes.
Mastering the Game Boy Palette: How 4 Shades Became an Art Form
A technical exploration of 2BPP planar memory, BGP color register indirection, and strict contrast hierarchies on the 1989 Nintendo DMG-01 LCD display.
Pixel Art Wasn’t Made to Be Resized Like a Photo
Why standard bilinear interpolation turns crisp retro sprites into blurry smudges, and how integer nearest-neighbor sampling preserves razor-sharp edges on modern high-DPI displays.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Everything you need to know about the PixKit image to pixel art converter.