: How do I easily convert a fuzzy pixel art image back into pixels? I want to convert a fuzzy pixel art image into a crisp actually-pixel-art pixel art image. An example of this is taking a

@Shelley591

Per Philip's request, I'll turn this into an answer:

The only real solution is to pick the pencil tool and get to redrawing/touching-up by hand. Alas, there's no magic filter for this. JPG/MPG is lossy compression. By definition you've lost image data that you're not going to get back.

Others have suggested some automated ways that could help, for sure, but they are hardly programmatic. Whether it's the pencil tool or playing with curves, or posterizing, it's all going to need to be done by hand to ensure it's doing what you want it to do.

That said, if this is an animation, and you get get one frame looking fairly well in PhotoShop, then record the actions in PhotoShop and then you could batch process the rest of the frames.

I still think you'll have to go in frame-by-frame though to get it the way you want.

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@Cugini998

You haven't been very clear about your exact goal. I think you want to do two things: clean up the compression artifacts, then downscale the image while maintaining crispness.

For the compression artifacts, there are lots of JPEG recovery utilities that produce pretty good results, though not perfect, and I don't know how well they work with pixel art.

If those don't work for you, you'll need to touch up your images by hand with something like an eraser tool.

After you've fixed the JPEG compression, just downscale your image the way felixthehat described.


I'm having issues with trying to workout what scale I'm working in


To figure that one out, zoom your image about 800% in Photoshop. At that point, a grid appears. By looking at that grid, you can figure out the size of every upscaled square pixel. And that tells you the scale factor.

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@Nickens508

I'm not sure if this answers your question, but have you tried scaling it in photoshop using Image Size with Nearest Neighbour (preserve hard edges) selected in the Resampling dropdown? That gives you a lossless size increase...

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