PIXEL
Browser-only pixel art tool. Vintage film looks and authentic pixel art for your photos — previewed live on your own image, rendered on your GPU. No upload, no account, no watermark.
Live at pixel.amoghbajpai.com.
How it works
Pick a look → adjust one slider → Save.
- Three tabs: FILM (87 looks), PIXEL (size, colours, pattern), MORE (texture, sound).
- Every option is a live thumbnail of your photo; hover on desktop previews it full-size.
- Hold the photo (or
\) to see the original. ⚄ Surprise (Space) rolls a new look.
- Undo / redo, and the session survives a reload (IndexedDB + localStorage).
- The URL is the recipe (
#r=1~px:8~pal:pico8~film:portra400.s7): copy it to share a look, never the photo.
- Saved PNGs carry the recipe in a
tEXt chunk — drop one back in and the look comes with it.
- Save options: native ×1–8, or padded frames for IG 4:5 / 3:4, Story 9:16, square.
- Keyboard (optional):
← → next look, 1 2 3 tabs, F favourite, ⌘S save, ⌘K search everything, ? all keys.
Features
- Block-average pixelation with adjustable size (1–48 px)
- 9 palette presets: Game Boy, GB Pocket, CGA, PICO-8, Sweetie 16, C64, Endesga 32, Mono, Original
- Dithering: none, Floyd-Steinberg, Bayer 4×4, Bayer 8×8
- Film: 81 film, camera, and print-process looks in six groups —
colour negative (Portra, Gold, Superia, Wolfen NC500…), slide & cinema
(Kodachrome, Velvia, Vision3→2383 print, CineStill 800T halation,
Technicolor 2-strip), lab & decay (cross-process, redscale, LomoChrome
Purple, Aerochrome, expired-roll lottery, faded '70s print), cameras
(SX-70, Instax, Holga, disposable flash with LED date stamp, Super 8 gate),
antique (tintype, daguerreotype, autochrome, cyanotype, platinum,
hand-tinted), earth & auteur grades, and AFTERDARK — the IG-goth /
underground-rap edits: NightShot IR camcorder, trail cam, thermal, VHS
found footage, witch house, xerox zine, halftone, riso misprint, grunge
angel dithers with misregistered plates and torn photocopy frames,
cutout and gig-poster posterize, 1-bit, soft grunge '14, deep fried and
CCD digicam (with burned-in REC / PLAY / trail-cam HUDs and real JPEG
crunch).
- PS2 & PAINT: your photo as a PS2-era low-poly model ("sharp blurriness",
after Gao Hang) — person cut out in-browser (MediaPipe selfie segmenter,
self-hosted, loaded on first use), colour regions traced into straight
polygons, each airbrushed with an edge-clamped blur, on flat red / lime /
sky. Plus AIRBRUSH CANVAS (whole frame faceted), STICKER (cut-out, thick
outline, cartoon sky) and IMPASTO (Kuwahara + raking light). One parametric model on the GPU
with a CPU port: channel mixer, 12-band hue control, gray-ramp curves,
split tone, halation, grain, vignette, leaks, dust, and print borders.
PHOTO MODE bypasses the pixel stages for a straight film look.
- Export: PNG at 1×, 2×, 4×, or 8× nearest-neighbor upscale
- Privacy by default: every step runs in your browser. No upload, no tracking.
Stack
- Next.js 15 (App Router, static export)
- TypeScript strict
- Tailwind CSS
- Pure Canvas 2D — no image processing libraries
Run locally
npm install
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000.
Build
npm run build
Outputs a static site to out/ ready to drop on any static host.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.
Contributing
Palette PRs welcome. Add an entry to lib/palettes.ts with a clear name, source attribution in the description, and accurate hex values.
Credits
Sample photo: Chuck Norris, The Delta Force (1986) by Yoni S. Hamenahem, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized.
