About PixelArtFromPhoto
Last updated · Written and tested by The PixelArtFromPhoto team, who build and maintain this tool.
PixelArtFromPhoto is built by a small team of developers who also make things: game sprites, avatars, fuse-bead coasters and the odd cross stitch gift. We kept switching between three or four websites to get one pattern: one to pixelate, one to count beads, one to print a chart. Most of them uploaded our photos or covered the result in ads.
So we built one tool that does it properly:
- A real pixel art converter with area-averaged downscaling, perceptual (OKLab) colour matching, five dithering modes and outlines.
- Real craft colours: Perler, Hama, Artkal, DMC and Minecraft palettes with exact counts.
- Private by design: conversion, pixelation, blur and face finding run in your browser, so your photos never leave your device.
- Free with no watermark, plus an optional Pro plan for printable patterns, huge exports and batches.
How we test
Every release is checked against a set of test images: portraits, pets, landscapes, logos with transparency and low-contrast photos. We compare palettes side by side, print bead and cross stitch PDFs on US Letter and A4 to check that symbols are readable, and test the pixelate tool on faces and text at several block sizes. Face finding uses Google's open-source MediaPipe face detector (Apache-2.0), running locally.
Colour data credits
Craft colours come from craft-color-codes by MakeBead (DMC floss and Minecraft blocks: CC BY 4.0), which compiles Perler, Hama and Artkal values from maxcleme/beadcolors (MIT). Screen colours are approximations: always buy by the code. Perler, Hama, Artkal, DMC and Minecraft are trademarks of their owners and are not affiliated with us.
Contact
A bug, a palette you want added, or a photo that didn't convert well? Tell us, we read everything.