Tips for a better conversion
- Crop tight first. At 32 or 48 pixels wide, every pixel of empty space is a pixel your subject doesn't get.
- Simple shapes, strong contrast. A single object or a face on a plain background converts far better than a busy scene. Nudge contrast up if the result looks muddy.
- Go smaller than you think. Pixel art reads at small sizes; a 128-pixel conversion of a photo still looks like a photo.
- Fewer colours, then dither if needed. 8 to 16 colours usually look the most like pixel art. Turn on dithering when a sky or a skin gradient breaks into hard bands.
- For a sprite on transparency, use a PNG with a transparent background (or "Cut out flat background") and add the outline.
What makes pixel art read well
Pixel art isn't just a small image. Three things make it look deliberate, and they're worth knowing even when you start from a conversion:
- One grid. Every pixel is the same size and sits on the same grid. Mixing pixel sizes ("mixels"), or scaling a sprite by a non-whole factor, is the first thing people notice. That's why the downloads here scale only by whole numbers with hard edges.
- A limited palette. A few colours, chosen on purpose and reused, hold a sprite together. A converter picks colours by counting; an artist picks them for light, shadow and contrast, which is why a curated palette like PICO-8 or Endesga 32 often looks better than an automatic one.
- Clean edges. Outlines without stray pixels, curves stepped in even runs, no blurry half-tones along the edge, and no isolated single pixels of noise. Downscaling can't know which pixels matter, so this is the part you usually fix by hand.
A conversion is a good start for reference, a backdrop or a profile picture. To make it look hand-made, open the 1× PNG in a pixel editor and clean the edges and the noise.
Need a game sprite drawn on the grid instead?
A converter can only rework an image you already have. SpriteForge's studio draws new sprites, animations and tilesets: Claude places each pixel on a fixed grid from your palette, so you get real pixel art you can keep editing, not a downscaled picture. New accounts get a $1 free credit, enough for a few sprites.
The free pixel art maker opens PNGs up to 64×64: drop your 1× download onto it to clean up edges. More on why AI and converted pixel art often looks off is on the blog, starting with why AI pixel art looks bad.
Questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The converter runs entirely in your browser: the file is read on your device, scaled on a canvas and reduced to a palette in a Web Worker. The image is never sent to SpriteForge or anyone else. The page counts visits with cookie-free analytics; that never includes your image.
What sizes can I convert to?
Output widths of 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96 or 128 pixels; the height follows your image's aspect ratio. Download the PNG at 1× (one image pixel per pixel-art pixel) or scaled up 4× or 8× with hard edges for sharing. Inputs up to about 4000 px work; larger images are scaled down first.
Can I use a specific palette like PICO-8?
Yes. Either let the converter pick 4 to 32 colours from your image with k-means clustering, or map it to a fixed palette: PICO-8, Sweetie 16, Endesga 32, the Game Boy greens, or your own palette pasted as a list of hex colours. Palettes via Lospec, credited to their authors.
Does it keep transparency?
Yes. Transparent areas of a PNG stay transparent; each pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque, as pixel art should be. You can instead fill transparent areas with a colour, cut out a flat background colour, and add a 1 px dark outline around the shape.
Can I use the pixel art commercially?
SpriteForge claims no rights over what you convert. Whether you can use the result depends on the source image: if you made it or have the rights to it, you can use the pixel art version, including in a commercial game. Converting someone else's artwork or photo does not make it yours.
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