PixelThat

Turn any photo into crisp pixel art on your iPhone. It finds the face, lifts the background and redraws it with a handful of colours. Nothing ever leaves your device.

PixelThat turns a photo into crisp pixel art, right on your iPhone.

Point it at a picture and it does the work a pixel artist would do: it finds the face and frames it the way an avatar is framed, lifts the subject off the background so the edges stay clean, and flattens the colours to a small, deliberate palette chosen from the picture itself, with faces weighted so skin tones survive. Only then does it lay down the pixels.

Everything runs on your device. There is no account, no upload and no queue. The app contains no networking code at all, so it works with the network switched off.

AVATARS THAT FIND THE FACE • Auto framing puts the head where an avatar's head belongs • Or drag the selection box yourself: move it, pinch it, tap to jump • Square, rounded or circle, with a 1 to 4 pixel frame in any colour

BACKGROUNDS ON YOUR TERMS • Transparent, a flat colour, a two-colour gradient, a pixel-art blue sky with clouds, or keep the photo • On-device subject cutout with a threshold, grow and shrink, and a live preview when it needs a nudge

PALETTES WORTH KEEPING • A palette built from your own picture, in CIELAB, with faces weighted • Or PICO-8, Sweetie 16, Endesga 32, Game Boy, Commodore 64, CGA, ZX Spectrum, greyscale and 1-bit • Paste your own hex colours • Floyd-Steinberg and ordered 2x2, 4x4 and 8x8 dithering

NINE ONE-TAP STYLES Natural, Soft, Bold, Comic, Retro, Arcade, Game Boy, Neon and Mono set the palette, dithering, grade and ink together. Everything they change stays editable.

FINE CONTROL WHEN YOU WANT IT • Sizes from 8 to 256 pixels, or any width from 4 to 512 • Eight colour grades, auto levels, ink edges and outlines • Contrast, saturation, brightness, gamma and hue • Fine zoom, pan and mirror

RECENTS THAT REMEMBER Every picture you keep is filed with the settings that made it. Tap it later to put those settings on a different photo, which is how you make a set of avatars that match.

THREE THEMES Studio, Arcade and Bubblegum.

EXPORT Save the enlarged copy to Photos, which is what most sites want for an avatar, or share both the real pixels and the enlargement.

PRIVACY PixelThat collects nothing. No account, no analytics, no advertising identifier, no tracking and no network requests of any kind.