Pixel art upscaler and scaler, no blur

Enlarge a sprite without the mush. This pixel art upscaler scales 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x using nearest-neighbor, so every pixel stays a hard square instead of dissolving into its neighbors.

What blurring actually is

Every general image editor guesses at the pixels between your pixels, and that guess is the blur.

Same 52x50 chest, same 8x enlargement, two different methods. Bilinear and bicubic interpolation average each new pixel against the ones around it, which is right for photographs and wrong for art where the hard edge is the drawing.

Nearest-neighbor does no averaging. It repeats each source pixel into an exact block, so the sprite gets bigger and nothing else changes.

Look at an edge

Zoom in and the difference stops being subtle.

On the left, every pixel the artist placed is still a square you could count. On the right the lock has become a gradient, the outline has a halo, and the palette now holds hundreds of colors that were never in the original.

That last part matters beyond looks. A blurred sprite no longer has a limited palette, so it won't index cleanly, won't key transparency reliably, and won't match the rest of your set.

Scale factors, and which to pick

Use a whole-number factor, always.

A whole number maps one source pixel onto an exact block. Scale by 3.5x and some pixels get four output pixels while their neighbors get three, which puts a visible stagger through straight lines even with nearest-neighbor doing the work.

2x to 4x is the game-engine and screenshot range. 8x to 16x is for social media, thumbnails and print, where you want the pixels themselves to be the aesthetic. The tool offers 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x, and stops there because past that you're better off exporting once and scaling in the destination.

High res pixel art is a scaling job, not a redrawing one. A 32x32 sprite at 16x is a 512x512 file that still holds exactly 32 by 32 decisions, which is the point. Nothing added detail, so the art survives being large. Asking software to invent detail at higher resolution gives you something smoother and worse.

Upscaling is not resizing

This tool only makes sprites bigger. Making them smaller is a different problem.

Enlarging repeats pixels, which is lossless and reversible. Shrinking has to discard them, and once four pixels become one there's no rule that keeps the art readable, so it needs its own handling. The pixel art resizer covers going down, or to an exact width and height that isn't a clean multiple.

How it works

Three steps, and nothing leaves your browser.

1. Upload a pixel art image, PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF, up to 512x512
2. Pick 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x
3. Download the enlarged PNG

No account, no watermark, no upload to a server.

After the upscale

An upscaled sprite is usually on its way somewhere else.

Send it to the pixel editor if it needs touching up, the background remover if it's going on a store page, or the sprite sheet maker if it's one frame of several. If you don't have the sprite yet, the AI sprite generator at Sprite AI (sprite-ai.art) makes one from a text description at 32x32 up to 512x512.