Pixel You: Pixel Art Maker

Pixel You turns a photo into a real low-resolution sprite — an actual pixel grid locked to a retro palette, not a filter laid on top.

Shoot or pick a photo, choose a palette, and every pixel becomes a deliberate choice: NES, Game Boy, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, PICO-8, CGA, Virtual Boy, DawnBringer 16, Sweetie 16, 1-bit black and white, and more.

FEATURES

• AUTO palette — extracts the 16 colours that fit your photo best using median-cut, so the result still reads like the picture you took.
• 13 built-in palettes — hardware palettes for the authentic retro look, modern pixel-art palettes for portraits.
• Real dithering — Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson and Bayer 4×4, with adjustable strength. The quantisation error is actually diffused, not faked with a texture.
• Fine control — contrast, saturation and dither strength sliders, and output widths from 32 to 512 pixels.
• Screen filters — CRT scanlines and vignette, VHS chroma shift and tape noise.
• Compare with the original — press and hold the preview, release to go back.
• Save and share — exports a clean 1024-pixel PNG to your gallery or the share sheet.
• History — every save and share is kept, ready to send again.

HOW IT WORKS

Most pixel-art filters blur the image and posterise it. Pixel You averages each output pixel properly, maps it to the closest palette colour with a perceptually weighted distance, and then dithers — which is how a four-colour Game Boy screen manages to show a sky.

PRIVACY

No account, no uploads, no ads. Your photos never leave your device — they are processed locally and never transmitted.

Recent changes:
Avatar studio: build a pixel portrait from face, hair, outfit and background layers, then save it.