Pixel Dither
Turn any image into dithered pixel art: chunky square pixels, a small palette taken from the image itself, and ordered (Bayer) dithering that turns smooth gradients into checkerboards and dot fields.
- Private. Everything happens in your browser. Images are never uploaded.
- Works offline, and installs as an app on desktop and phone.
- No dependencies, no build step. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript modules.
Use it
Open the app, then drop, paste or choose an image. Adjust:
| Control | What it does |
|---|
| Pixel size | How many pixels across. Fewer means bigger, chunkier pixels. |
| Palette | The image's own colours, or a preset: 1-bit, Game Boy, PICO-8, Dusk. |
| Colours | How many colours to find in the image (own palette only). |
| Dither | How strongly gradients are broken into pattern. 0 gives flat bands. |
| Pattern | Bayer 8×8 (fine), 4×4 (chunky), 2×2 (checker) or none. |
| Export size | 1× is one pixel per cell; larger sizes stay crisp. |
Then Download PNG, Copy, or Compare with the original.
How it works
- Shrink. The image is scaled down to the grid, halving in steps so detail is averaged rather than skipped.
- Palette. K-means clustering finds the colours that best represent the image. It is seeded from a fixed generator, so the same image and settings always give the same result.
- Dither. Each pixel is nudged up or down by its place in a Bayer threshold matrix, then snapped to the nearest palette colour. The nudge is scaled to the palette's own spacing, so the setting feels the same with 4 colours or 16.
Ordered dithering is chosen over error diffusion (Floyd–Steinberg) on purpose: it produces regular, repeating pattern, which is the look of classic pixel art. Error diffusion reads as noise.
The result is drawn at the grid's real size and scaled up with image-rendering: pixelated, so every pixel is a sharp square at any zoom.
Run it locally
Any static file server works. With Python:
npm start
Then open http://localhost:4321. (Opening index.html straight from disk also works, without offline support.)
Use the code as a library
src/dither.js has no DOM in it, so it runs in browsers, workers and Node:
import { findPalette, dither, PRESETS, hexToRgb } from "pixel-dither";
// pixels: { data: Uint8ClampedArray (RGBA), width, height }, already shrunk
const palette = findPalette(pixels, 10); // or PRESETS["Game Boy"].map(hexToRgb)
dither(pixels, palette, { strength: 0.6, matrix: 8 }); // in place
Tests
npm test
Deploy
It is a static site: deploy the folder as is to Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages or any host. When you change a file, nothing else is needed: the offline cache always fetches fresh files first. Bump VERSION in sw.js only when files are added or removed.
Licence
MIT © 2026 Roshan Prasad.
The sample pictures in samples/ (the jellyfish, the marble bust, the chrome knot and the dunes) were generated by Roshan Prasad with Google Gemini for this project. Made by Roshan Prasad.
