ArcadeOn Pixel

ArcadeOn Pixel gives you full control over the pixel art look without the fiddly Photoshop setup. Open an image, pick a preset — Clean Sprite, Game Boy, NES, PICO-8, 1-bit Mono, Sepia Tone — and tweak every knob live: pixel size, palette, dither, outline, colour balance. The preview updates as fast as you can drag a slider.

Transparency is preserved end-to-end, so sprites stay sprites. Outlines grow outside the silhouette, never cutting into your subject. When you've nailed a look, batch-process an entire folder with one click and every image comes out with the same treatment.

Everything runs locally on your machine — no cloud, no accounts, no uploads. Your source files never leave your PC.

Built for indie game developers, pixel artists, content creators and anyone who needs retro-styled graphics at scale.

Key features

Retro palettes, properly done

• 10 built-in palettes: Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, PICO-8, NES (32-color), CGA, Monochrome, Sepia, Teletext
• Adaptive and Grayscale modes with 2–64 colours
• Three quantisation algorithms: Median Cut, Max Coverage, Fast Octree

Fine-grained control

• Pixel size 2–32 px with four downsample algorithms (Area Average, Lanczos, Bilinear, Nearest)
• Dither styles: None, Floyd-Steinberg, Bayer 4×4, Bayer 8×8
• Image adjustments: pre-smoothing, sharpen, saturation, contrast, brightness, gamma, hue shift
• Alpha threshold and configurable outer outline (never cuts into the image)

Live workflow

• Instant debounced preview — tweak sliders and watch the result update
• Zoom and pan with Ctrl+wheel and drag
• Hold Space (or the Compare button) to flash the original behind the pixel art
• Six one-click presets as starting points
• Double-click any slider to reset to its default

Batch mode

• Point it at a folder and pixelate every supported image with the current settings
• Live progress, cancel anytime, per-file error report
• Outputs to a clean pixelated/ subfolder

Export that fits your pipeline

• PNG output with transparency preserved
• 1×, 2× or 4× export scaling
• Raw 1:1 pixel grid option for tile-accurate output

Built for desktop

• Native Windows app — no browser, no server, no cloud
• Code-signed executable (ArcadeOn Studios)
• Remembers your last window size and settings between sessions
• Drag and drop anywhere on the window
• Keyboard shortcuts throughout (Ctrl+O / Ctrl+S / Ctrl+R)

Supported formats Input: PNG · JPG · WebP · BMP · TIFF Output: PNG (with alpha)

System requirements Windows 10 or 11 · ~150 MB disk · No internet connection required