YourTool guide
Pixel-art palettes, color reduction and dithering
A small palette is useful when its colors have clear roles. Reducing an image to eight colors does not automatically make it readable pixel art: sampling, contrast and placement still determine whether a silhouette survives. Manual palette design and automatic color reduction solve different parts of that problem.
Give colors a job
Start with a few roles: outline or deepest shadow, midtone, light and a focal accent. A color ramp is an ordered set of related tones used to shade one material. Neighboring tones need enough separation to remain distinguishable at the artwork’s intended size.
For a small green tree, reserve a dark trunk/outline, a deep green shadow, a lighter leaf color and a highlight. A dozen nearly identical greens may consume the palette while contributing little to the silhouette. Test colors against the actual background, including transparency.
Quantization is a compromise
Quantization maps source colors to a smaller set of representative colors. The requested count is a ceiling, not a requirement to invent missing colors. A two-color source may still need only two colors when the limit is eight.
Pixel Paint groups sampled colors and fits a deterministic palette that includes alpha differences. Removing unused colors keeps the numbering compact. If a small red feature vanishes, increasing the palette may help, but a feature lost during low-resolution sampling cannot be recovered by palette size alone.
Dithering adds spatial patterns
Dithering represents intermediate tones by placing different palette colors in neighboring pixels. It trades a smooth-looking transition at viewing distance for visible texture at close range. Error diffusion passes color error to later pixels; it does not add new palette colors.
Pixel Paint offers optional Floyd–Steinberg dithering after palette fitting. Its difficulty presets leave dithering off because alternating one-pixel patterns can make numbered painting unnecessarily fragmented. Try it for a textured gradient, and leave it off for clean flat icons or a puzzle with broad paint regions.
- Compare at normal viewing size as well as enlarged.
- Do not use dithering to disguise a weak outline.
- If numbers become scattered, prefer fewer details or clean regions over more texture.
Keep pixel edges distinct from palette choices
Nearest-neighbor enlargement repeats pixels rather than blending them. Smoothing can introduce intermediate display colors even if the source has a limited palette. This is a scaling decision, separate from quantization and dithering.
Use Pixel Studio for a deliberate drawing with reusable palettes, layers and frames. Use Pixel Paint to derive a limited-color target from a source image. The tools share pixel concepts, but Pixel Studio does not automatically quantize a photograph. Keep project JSON when you need editability; PNG stores the rendered result.