Image Posterize Tool
Reduce photos to bold, flat bands of colour. Posterizing limits each colour channel to a few levels – two levels give eight colours, four levels sixty-four – which turns smooth gradients into graphic shapes like a screen print or pop-art poster. Smooth the image first to avoid speckles, or add ordered dithering for a retro computer look.
- Files stay on your device
- No sign-up
- Free to use
Posterize
Output
How to use Image Posterize Tool
- Drop one or more images onto the page.
- Choose the number of levels per channel.
- Smooth first or add dithering if needed.
- Download the posterized images.
Image Posterize Tool features
2–16 levels
From 8 to 4,096 colours.
Smoothing
Removes speckles before reducing.
Ordered dithering
Bayer pattern for a retro look.
Colour count
Shows the maximum number of colours.
Batch
Apply the same settings to up to 50 images.
Private
Processed in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
When to use Image Posterize Tool
- Pop-art portraits and posters.
- Preparing artwork for screen printing.
- Retro game and 8-bit graphics.
- Stylised backgrounds and textures.
Image Posterize Tool FAQ
What does posterize mean?
Reducing the number of tones so that gradients turn into visible steps, like the limited ink colours of a printed poster.
How many colours do I get?
Levels × levels × levels: 2 levels give 8 colours, 3 give 27, 4 give 64. The caption shows the number.
Why smooth first?
Noise and fine texture produce scattered pixels at the edges of colour bands. A slight blur before posterizing gives cleaner shapes.
How is this different from pixel art?
Posterizing keeps the resolution and uses fixed steps per channel. The Pixel Art Generator also reduces resolution and picks a palette that fits the image.
Which formats can I use?
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF (first frame), BMP and AVIF in; JPG, PNG or WebP out. PNG and WebP keep transparency; JPG gets a white background.
Are my images uploaded?
No. The images are processed in your browser and never leave your device.
Posterization and colour steps
Before digital printing, posters were printed with a handful of inks, so photographs had to be reduced to flat areas of colour. The resulting look – strong shapes, visible tonal steps, graphic simplicity – became an art style of its own, from Andy Warhol’s screen prints to modern gig posters.
Digitally, posterizing rounds every red, green and blue value to the nearest of a few evenly spaced levels. With two levels, each channel is either off or on, giving the eight primary and secondary colours plus black and white. With four levels, sixty-four colours are possible and the image becomes recognisable as a photo with visible banding.
Ordered dithering adds a fixed 4×4 pattern of small offsets before rounding. Pixels near a step boundary then alternate between the two neighbouring levels, which looks like an intermediate tone from a distance. It is the characteristic texture of early computer graphics and some newspaper printing.
Smoothing first is often the key to a clean result. Noise in photos makes neighbouring pixels jump between levels; a light blur evens this out and yields large, calm areas of colour.
For screen printing, choose the number of levels by the number of inks you can afford: two or three levels on a single channel image are easy to separate into stencils, while more levels need more screens.
The images are processed on your device.