Flatten smooth gradients into bold bands of color. Choose how many levels each channel keeps, add retro dithering if you like, and see how many colors remain.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to any server.
Flat bands of color give photos a screen-printed, pop-art poster feel.
Few levels plus dithering recreate the look of early computers and games.
Limiting colors helps plan screen printing, stencils and vinyl cuts.
Each color channel normally has 256 brightness levels. Posterizing rounds every value to the nearest of a few evenly spaced levels, so with 4 levels a channel can only be 0, 85, 170 or 255. With three channels that allows at most 64 colors, and smooth gradients turn into distinct steps.
Dithering trades those hard steps for patterns of dots. Ordered dithering adds a repeating Bayer threshold pattern for a crisp, retro texture. Floyd-Steinberg passes each pixel's rounding error to its neighbors, giving a finer, more natural grain that hides banding.
Pure primaries and secondaries: only 8 possible colors.
Turns the image into a few flat shades of gray.
Posterizes only brightness, keeping each pixel's hue.
At most levels cubed in color mode, such as 64 for 4 levels. The tool counts the colors actually used in the result.
It scatters the rounding error as small dots or patterns, so gradients look smoother even with very few colors.
Floyd-Steinberg gives the most natural result. Ordered dithering gives a regular, retro pattern that compresses better.
Extra contrast spreads the image across more of the available levels, giving punchier bands.
No. Posterizing happens entirely in your browser.
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