Finds the grid a blurry image is faking and rebuilds it clean, or turns any photo into true pixel art. Runs entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded.
Paste, drag, or pick a file. PNG, JPG, or WebP.
AI models paint the pixel art look at high resolution instead of drawing on a real grid — so it falls apart the moment you zoom in. Pixel Rehab measures the grid the image is only pretending to have, then rebuilds the artwork at its true native resolution. Drop in anything else and Pixelize mode turns it into pixel art from scratch. Built for game devs, sprite artists, and anyone whose "pixel art" is secretly 40,000 colors of mush.
Pixel Rehab is a free browser tool that converts fake pixel art into true pixel art. It finds the pseudo-pixel grid hiding inside a blurry, high-resolution image and rebuilds the artwork at its real native resolution, where every pixel is one flat color. It can also pixelize an ordinary photo into pixel art from scratch.
Models like ChatGPT, Midjourney and DALL-E paint the pixel art look at high resolution instead of drawing on an actual grid. From a distance it passes. Zoomed in you see soft edges, gradients, and thousands of colors where real pixel art would use a couple dozen. Pixels that don't sit on the shared grid are often called mixels. Pixel Rehab measures the grid the image is imitating and snaps the artwork back onto it.
Drop the photo in and switch to Pixelize mode. A photo has no hidden pixel grid to recover, so instead you choose the output width in pixels and Pixel Rehab downsamples to it and reduces the color palette. Smaller widths and fewer colors give a more retro result — around 24 colors is a good starting point. For a different spin on the same idea, try CSS Pixel Art.
AI pixel grids drift. The cell size is rarely a clean whole number and often changes slightly across the image, so three independent detectors can land on neighboring answers. When they disagree, Pixel Rehab flags the result low confidence. Nudge the columns and rows with the manual override and the output rebuilds instantly.
No. Everything runs inside your browser using a web worker. Your image is never sent to a server, and there's no account, no queue, and no upload step.
A PNG at the true native resolution — a sprite detected as 104×138 downloads as a 104×138 PNG. That's the file you want for a game engine or for editing in Aseprite. You can also export a clean integer upscale at 2x, 4x or 8x for posting online, where a tiny PNG would otherwise get resampled into mush.
Naive downscaling assumes the grid starts at the corner and that every cell is the same size. Fake pixel art breaks both assumptions, so plain resizing smears neighboring cells together into blur and stray colors. Pixel Rehab measures where the cell boundaries actually are, snaps the cuts to them, and takes a center-weighted vote inside each cell so anti-aliased edges don't contaminate the result.
Pixel Rehab uses the classical approach: three phase-free detectors vote on the cell size, then the image is rebuilt on the grid they agree on. It's free, needs no signup, and runs locally. Retro Diffusion — whose algorithm this app ports — also offers a hosted neural fixer that can repair damage pure grid math can't recover. Worth trying when detection here comes back low confidence.