Reduce to a palette
Put an image on a palette: every pixel becomes the nearest palette colour, as the eye sees it.
Free, no sign-up. It runs in your browser: your files never leave your computer, and the tool works offline once the page has loaded.
Zoom with the buttons or the mouse wheel over a picture; drag a zoomed picture to move round it. Both pictures zoom and move together.
How to use it
- Drop an image on the box.
- Paste a palette (hex colours, one per line or separated by spaces), or load a .hex, .gpl or palette image.
- Optionally add ordered dithering.
- Download the PNG.
Nearest colour, as the eye sees it
Each pixel goes to the palette colour that looks closest. “Closest” is measured in OKLab, a colour space built so that equal distances look equally different, rather than in plain RGB, which overrates some differences and misses others. Transparent pixels stay transparent.
Dithering
With few colours, smooth gradients turn into bands. Ordered dithering mixes two neighbouring colours in a fixed checker-like (Bayer) pattern, which reads as an in-between shade. Pixel artists use it sparingly: try none first. More in dithering.
Where to find palettes
Lospec’s palette list has thousands, free to use; copy a palette’s hex codes or download its .hex file. The default here is the 16-colour “Sweetie 16”.
Making sprites from 3D models? Pixor renders a model into pixel-art sheets from every side, frame by frame, and writes GIFs, Aseprite files and engine formats itself. How it works.
Try Pixor freeMore free tools
- GLB and glTF viewer: Open a 3D model, orbit it, play its animations, and see what is wrong with it.
- Sprite sheet to GIF: Turn a sprite sheet into an animated GIF or APNG, pixel-perfect.
- GIF to sprite sheet: Split an animated GIF into a sprite sheet, with its frame times.
- Sprite sheet slicer: Cut a sheet into frames, by grid or by the gaps between sprites.
- Pixel art scaler: Scale pixel art 2× to 16× with no blur, for posts and stores.
- Sprite sheet maker: Pack frames into one sheet, with a JSON your engine reads.