chief
Prime VIP
I have to be honest. I love the look of pixelated graphics! If you’re also a fan of jaggies or old school video game graphics, here is a simple trick to relive a little bit of that low pixel-depth goodness in any version of Photoshop.
I start with an iconic image, but use any you prefer. Lisa will be recognizable in any pixel depth, so she’s a good candidate.
Press
Lisa has more highlights and we can see a lot more of the detail in the dark areas. This can help our final result be more recognizable.
Resizing causes Photoshop to anti-alias your image. We set our Image to “Indexed Color” in Image > Mode > Indexed Color to counteract that. You can use my values here or play with the settings and pick your own. Each will give you a slightly different result. Any Index color setting will give you the correct final product, so feel free to play with the settings.
Press
I size mine down to a width of 75 pixels. That’s roughly 2% of the original image size.
As you can see, it’s a pretty huge change!
From there, change the pull-down tab that reads “Pixels” to “Percent.” I blow up my image to 400% of it’s new size. You’ll get better results if you use multiples, like 200% (2x) or 1000% (10x).