Palettes
How many colors should pixel art use?
Use 4 colors when you want a handheld-console poster, 8 to 16 for a sprite or stitch chart, and cap a photo study at 32. Past that, you're keeping the photograph.
The Colors slider is a hard cap. The converter samples one average color per cell, then splits that cloud with a median cut until it has the number you asked for. Median cut keeps slicing the biggest remaining range of red, green, or blue. It's not a vibe filter. If you ask for 8, the legend should list 8 swatches, or fewer if the picture was already plain.
Match the count to the job
A stitch chart at 40 cells wide with 30 colors is a bad Saturday. Each color's a skein, a symbol, and a pile of counting. Start at 12 for cross-stitch and 8 for fuse beads. You can go up after you see the face survive. The stitch page locks the palette to a published floss list and then keeps only as many of those numbers as the slider allows. Twelve seeds, twelve nearest floss numbers, then the cells snap to that short list.
A game sprite at 32×32 rarely needs more than 16. Extra colors read as dirt on the outline. If you're matching an existing game, stop using "source colors" and pick the palette the game already uses. Pico-8 is 16 fixed hex values. The handheld green palette is 4. Pixelate Sunset is 8 colors drawn for this site. The slider still applies: set it to 8 on Pico-8 and you get the 8 Pico-8 colors closest to your picture, not a random eight.
When fewer colors look worse
A sunset with 4 colors and dithering off becomes stripes. Turn Floyd–Steinberg on, or give the sky 8 colors and leave the foreground flat. Skin is the same problem. One beige plus one shadow works for a sprite. A portrait wants a dither or a couple of extra midtones. Read the dithering guide before you keep adding colors to fix a gradient. Adding colors is the expensive fix. Dithering is the cheap one.
"No color cut" skips the median cut. You still get a grid, and a photo can easily produce more than 100 colors at width 64. That's useful when you're about to sample a palette by hand, and useless when you wanted pixel art. The palette extractor is the better page if the swatches are the point and the grid is only a preview. The write-up of how those swatches are chosen is extract a color palette.
A quick test with numbers
Take one photo. Export three small PNGs: 32 colors, 12 colors, and 6 colors, all at the same width, dithering off. Look at them at 2× zoom, not at the scaled preview from across the room. The 32-color file will look closer to the photo and worse as an icon. The 6-color file will show which shapes were actually structural. Pick the smallest count where the silhouette and the one important detail (an eye, a logo mark, a red door) still exist. You'll know when you've gone too far.
If you're about to map those colors onto Pico-8, do the reduction first in source colors, then switch the palette menu. You'll see what the limit itself did, before the hex values changed. The Pico-8 page lists the 16 published colors and the kind of scene that still reads inside them.
Write the count you chose in the filename or in a note next to the PNG. "12 colors, width 40, dither off" is reproducible. "The retro one" isn't. Hand the file to someone else and they'll rebuild it only if those three numbers travel with it. Copy the meta line before you close the tab; it won't keep a project file.
When to refuse more colors
Stop raising the slider when new shades don't read at arm's length or the outline speckles. Stop lowering when a logo merges with its background. Try crop or contrast first.
Checklist before you lock a count
Same width as your final export. Dither setting chosen for the exit (off for stitch/beads, maybe on for sky). Legend count equals slider unless a fixed palette caps lower. One squint test at thumbnail size. If the answer is a game asset, confirm under 16. If the answer is a chart, confirm under 14. Extract-only work can stop at the palette page without pretending the grid is art.
Questions
What does the Colors slider do?
It runs a median cut on the grid and keeps that many colors. 16 means sixteen, unless a fixed palette such as Pico-8 is selected, in which case it keeps that many colors from the palette.
Should I check “No color cut”?
Usually no for pixel art. Use it when you want every sampled color kept. A photo'll still look like a photo, just blockier.
Why did two different colors become the same floss number?
The nearest-floss step can map two reduced colors onto one skein. The legend shows the merged count.
Is more color always more accurate?
On a coarse grid, more color often means more speckle, not more detail. Accuracy is whether the silhouette and one key feature survive.
Should sprites and photos use the same count?
No. Sprites often live at 8–16. Photo studies can go to 24–32. Craft charts should stay low; see the cross-stitch guide if you're stitching.
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Updated 30 September 2026