Most “image to pixel art” converters do two things badly: they downscale by throwing pixels away, and they leave you with 4,000 colours pretending to be pixel art. Here is how to get a clean result with a palette you actually chose.
File ▸ Import Image, or just drag the file onto the window. PNG, JPG, WEBP, BMP and animated GIF all work. The import dialog previews the result live, so you are not guessing.
Choose one of the presets (16, 32, 64, 128) or type a size. The aspect ratio is kept for you, and the import only ever scales down — upscaling is a different job and belongs in Field ▸ Resize.
Without it, a 2000 px photo reduced to 64 px is nearest-neighbour sampling: it grabs one pixel out of every thousand and throws the rest away, which is why naive downscales look noisy and lose thin lines. Smooth downscale averages each source block instead, so detail survives as tone.
Tick Lock to palette and either pick a colour count (8, 16, 32, 64) or load a palette file. Phluxel reads Lospec .hex directly, plus GIMP .gpl and JASC/Paint.NET .pal, so you can point it at any palette from the Lospec palette list and the image snaps to it.
If the source had a transparent background, averaging leaves a halo of half-transparent pixels around the subject. Hard edges forces every pixel to fully opaque or fully transparent, which is what you want for a sprite.
Export straight back out as a PNG, or leave it on the canvas and animate it — the effect rules work on imported art exactly the same as on art you painted by hand.
Phluxel applies these in a fixed order, and it is worth knowing why:
| Order | Stage | Why here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Resample | Average the source down to the target grid |
| 2 | Hard edges | Before quantising, so half-transparent edge pixels do not eat slots in the palette budget |
| 3 | Quantise | Map what is left onto the chosen palette |
Use Field ▸ Pixelate. It runs the same pipeline on a field that is already open, with the same options — target size, smooth downscale, palette lock, hard edges. There is also a Keep current size mode if you only want the colour reduction and not the resize, which is handy for tidying up a scene that a simulation has filled with thousands of in-between shades.
The Lospec palette list is the obvious place — thousands of palettes, all downloadable as .hex, which Phluxel reads as-is. Once a palette is loaded it stays locked across every export in that session, including animations and sprite sheets, so a whole set of assets comes out consistent.
Phluxel runs in the browser as a demo, and the free desktop edition has every feature with a watermark on exports.
Open the browser demo Download free (Windows) Wishlist on Steam