Pixel Art Maker

Pixel Art Maker is a program I imagined when I was playing around with the dithering feature of image manipulation softwares like Gimp for Pixel Art purposes. I realised that the Bayer's positional dithering generated some crosshatch patterns and wondered how I could make an algorithm that would generate arbitrary patterns.

The result is a combination of two image manipulation algorithms :

Generating an optimized limited color palette for an image.
Dithering an image with an arbitrary color palette, using a user-defined pattern.

Example — Original image, extracted palette, and the dithered result.

The palette generation is made using a K-means clustering algorithm that tries to find the set of colors that average best the colors from the input image.

The dithering is a positional ordered dithering algorithm, similar to the Bayer ordered dithering algorithm. However, instead of using the optimised Bayer matrix as a pattern, any grayscale image can be used as pattern source. This is destined to artists wanting to try out some unusual patterns in their creation. Draw a pattern image, define a palette and start the dithering. If the result is good, then it can be used and tweaked for a handmade piece of pixel art. If the result is not satisfying, it does not matter, try out something else, because it is fast.