How to turn a photo into pixel art

Turning a photo into pixel art used to mean two bad options: a Photoshop "mosaic" filter that just makes your photo blocky and muddy, or commissioning a pixel artist to redraw it by hand. There's a third way now — an AI model trained specifically on pixel art can redraw your photo in genuine pixel style, with real palettes, clean edges and deliberate detail, the way an artist would.

Here's the whole process with minia.art, start to finish.

Step 1: Upload your photo

Open the generator, and add your photo as a reference image. Any format your browser understands works — a phone selfie, a pet photo, a landscape. Clear subjects convert best: a face, a person, an animal, a building. Busy group shots with ten small faces lose too much detail at pixel resolutions.

Step 2: Dial in the strength

The strength slider decides how much of your photo survives the conversion:

• High strength keeps the composition and likeness — same pose, same colors, recognizably you, but rebuilt from pixels. This is the setting for avatars and portraits.
• Lower strength treats the photo as loose inspiration — the model keeps the general idea but takes creative liberties with details and style. Better for turning a landscape photo into something that looks like a game scene.

There's no universally right value; two or three attempts around the middle usually finds the sweet spot. Generations are fast, so experiment.

Step 3: Pick a style

The photo doesn't have to become a portrait — the twelve styles all accept a reference image. A face works beautifully through the portrait-leaning styles, but try a house photo through the isometric style or a street scene through top-down and you get game-asset versions of real places. Retro and watercolor styles give the same photo completely different moods.

Step 4 (optional): Steer the colors with a palette

If the result should match an existing project — your game's palette, your stream's brand colors — upload a palette image alongside the photo. The conversion then re-colors the output using only those tones. This is the difference between "a pixel version of my photo" and "a pixel version of my photo that drops straight into my game."

Step 5: Download

Download as PNG, optionally with a transparent background (perfect for avatars) and upscaled up to 8× if you need it large — the upscaling preserves hard pixel edges instead of smoothing them away.

Why this beats a pixelation filter

A mosaic filter averages your photo into squares — every square is a blurry compromise, edges land wherever the grid falls, and the result reads as "degraded photo," not pixel art. A pixel-art model redraws the image: it chooses a palette, places clean edges deliberately, simplifies shapes the way human pixel artists do, and produces something that would look at home in a game. The difference is obvious side by side — one looks broken, the other looks made.

Try it

The free plan includes 30 generations a month with no credit card — enough to convert a handful of photos and find your favorite settings. Start with your own photo →