Convert Image to Binary Art

Threshold is a hard cutoff – pure stencil look. Bayer 4×4 adds a fixed 4×4 pattern so gradients show as a regular crosshatch (unmistakable “retro” feel). Floyd-Steinberg diffuses quantization error to neighbors (7/16 right, 3/16 below-left, 5/16 below, 1/16 below-right) – smoothest for photos. Atkinson diffuses only 3/4 of the error across 6 neighbors – more contrast, less smooth, iconic for 1984 Mac graphics.

Each pixel is reduced to one of two colors. Originally a hardware limit on early computers (Mac Classic, Game Boy, dot-matrix printers); now an aesthetic choice. The tool outputs RGBA PNG but every pixel uses only two possible RGB triples, so zip compression shrinks it dramatically.

Floyd-Steinberg “remembers” the quantization error at each pixel and pushes it into yet-to-be-processed neighbors. Over many pixels, the errors cancel out, so large areas of mid-gray become a random-looking pattern of black and white dots whose average matches the original luminance. Threshold has no memory, so every pixel decides in isolation.

No. Everything – FileReader, Canvas 2D, dithering loops – runs locally in your browser. Open DevTools → Network and watch zero requests fire after the page loads. Safe for proprietary art, confidential photos, watermarked assets.

Anything the browser can decode via <img>: PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, WebP, and SVG. For animated GIFs only the first frame is dithered. HEIC only works in Safari (unless converted externally).

Transparent pixels (alpha = 0) are treated as maximum luminance (“white”), so they map to the light color. This prevents transparent PNG backgrounds from producing jagged dark borders. Fully opaque output – no alpha channel preserved.

Floyd-Steinberg on an 8000×8000 image can take several seconds on a laptop. Capping to 1024 px makes it near-instant and gives you the pixel-art aesthetic as a bonus. For a crisp stencil use the original; for a retro look, downscale first.

The two colors Nintendo used for the 1989 Game Boy’s iconic screen: #0F380F (dark olive) and #9BBC0F (pale green-yellow). Run any photo through Threshold + Game Boy Green and it looks like a Game Boy Camera screenshot.

If your browser supports the async Clipboard API’s ClipboardItem with image/png (Chromium-based, Safari 13.4+, Firefox 127+), yes – paste lands as an actual image in Slack/Discord/Photoshop. If not supported, we fall back to copying the data URL as text.

Yes. Once the page (under 20 KB of HTML+CSS+JS) loads, you can disconnect. The Image, Canvas, and FileReader APIs are all built into the browser – no external libraries, no CDN calls.