Troubleshooting
Fix a muddy pixel conversion
When a conversion looks like mud, change one thing at a time, in this order: contrast, pixel width, color count, dithering. Spinning all four sliders makes a new mess you can't learn from.
1. Contrast, ten points at a time
Flat phone photos map to a handful of similar grays. The legend will show five browns that you can't tell apart on the canvas. Set contrast to 15 or 20 and look again. If the shadows blocked up and the face lost its nose, you went too far. Step back by 5. Brightness is for a picture that's actually dark, not for a picture that's low-contrast. Saturation near 10 helps a washed-out logo. Saturation at 80 makes skin look like candy and then the palette snaps to the candy. Leave it near 0 unless the photo is genuinely gray.
2. Width, in steps of 8
Noise often means the cells are too small for the detail, so every cell catches a different speck. That sounds backwards until you try it. A 96-wide conversion of a forest is thousands of leaf-colored cells. A 40-wide conversion collapses each tree into a shape. Mud is the 96. Go down if you see static. Go up if the subject has become a rectangle with no features. The meta line tells you how many source pixels sit in each cell. If it says 4×4 on a sharp photo, you're keeping almost everything, including the sensor noise. That's not pixel art yet. The walkthrough starts people at 48 for this reason.
3. Fewer colors, not more
The instinct is to add colors until the photo comes back. The photo coming back is the mud. Drop from 24 to 12 and see if the silhouette gets cleaner. Posters live at 6 to 8. Sprites live at 8 to 16. If a single detail dies (a red logo on a red shirt), that's a contrast problem or a crop problem, not a request for 40 colors. The counts are spelled out in how many colors to use.
4. Then dither, or don't
If the shape is right and only the sky is banded, turn on Floyd–Steinberg. If the whole frame looks speckled, turn dithering off. Atkinson is the middle. Don't use dithering to compensate for a width that's still too high. You'll speckle the noise. The dithering guide has a sunset test you can copy.
Fixes that are actually edits
A stray cell on an outline isn't a slider problem. Click the outline's swatch and paint the cell. A background that ate the subject is a crop, or "drop the corner color" used too eagerly. Undo is Ctrl+Z for paint strokes. Slider moves rebuild the grid and throw the paint away, so paint last.
If none of this helps, the source may be the wrong source. A JPEG saved ten times, a screenshot of a screenshot, or a large PNG you already exported from this site will convert badly. Go back to the original file. The pixel converter can't recover detail the file already lost. Crop the one object you care about and run the order again from contrast.
Give the attempt a name that records the four numbers, for example dog-c20-w40-col12-off.png. When the fifth try finally looks right, you'll not remember that contrast was 20 rather than 40. The tab forgets when you close it. The filename doesn't. If you paint after the sliders settle, export immediately and add -paint to the name. A later slider move will wipe the paint, and an unsaved stroke is gone with the tab. There's no project file waiting on a server.
When mud isn't fixable in the tool
When the source is a screenshot of a screenshot, when the subject is inherently random (foliage, gravel, confetti), or when you refuse to crop to one object. Pick a simpler photo or draw a silhouette in a paint app and upload that.
Rescue order checklist
Contrast adjusted in steps of 5–10. Width changed in steps of 8. Colors lowered before raised. Dither toggled last. Source file confirmed original. One change per pass so you know which knob helped. Walkthrough reference: turn a photo into pixel art.
Logo mud often clears when you crop to the mark alone and set width to 32 with eight colors. Full-letterhead photos carry gray anti-aliasing the grid treats as real cells. Simplify the source, then rerun the four-step order.
Questions
Why does my photo look like noise?
The cells are small relative to the detail, or the colors are many and close. Widen the pixels or cut the palette. Contrast first if the source is flat.
I raised colors and it got worse.
More colors make a small grid look like a dirty photo. Try fewer colors and a slightly larger width instead.
The face is a blob.
The width is too low, or contrast crushed the midtones. Move contrast back toward 0 and add 8 to the width.
Should I fix mud with AI upscale first?
No. Upscale adds detail the grid will throw away again. Fix contrast and width on the original photo.
Does saturation fix mud?
Rarely. It helps washed-out logos. High saturation on skin creates candy colors that snap badly.
Keep going
Updated 30 September 2026