Pizzelator - image to pixel art converter with plenty of tunability

Little gift to the world! Some years ago, when programming was still a thing, I built this "Pizzelator" tool to convert images to pixel art. It is now there, open source, for you to use freely! https://cmaster11.github.io/pizzelator/ It allows for pixelating images with a breadth of variations, depending on the various color search algorithms and redraw methods. You can load an example image by clicking the "Try the example: a city street" button and see the result. I recommend trying to put any image/photo, selecting only certain areas of the photo, trying using only 16 colors (or even less!), see how many particular variations of an output there can be. I've been messing around with it for some months in the past, and it has brought me a ton of joy. Another note: the "clusters" search method will mostly produce a realistic effect, while the tolerance one will have more stylish outputs. Thanks to Claude. It was originally a Go CLI and has now been ported to Rust for in-browser use. Took like 30 min time. What times we live in :D

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u/TheRedundantDugout 1 2 hours ago

Just spent way too long throwing photos into this thing and watching them turn into Sega Genesis box art. The 16 color limit with tolerance mode is where it really shines, gets that chunky-but-readable look that's weirdly satisfying
u/Cmaster11 OP 1 2 hours ago

Happy to hear!!! The 16 color was my original use case, then it depends a lot on the kind of image. Photos of nature may have way too many shades for wanting to turn them into such low cardinality color palettes, then 24 is a nice upgrade
u/investigatormaker 1 2 hours ago

When I opened Pizzelator, the readable page capture contained only “Pizzelator”; add a plain HTML introduction explaining image-to-pixel-art conversion so the purpose survives even when the interactive interface isn’t captured. Your clusters-versus-tolerance distinction would also make a useful same-photo comparison at 16 colors, showing visitors what each method changes. I make ThreadFox. I went through Pizzelator as a first-time visitor and wrote up what I could and couldn’t see; the full check is free: https://threadfox.vip/p/pizzelator Can visitors switch methods while keeping the same selected area?