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 to open levels. You’ll want to ensure you have strong contrast if your image is close in value like this photograph of Lisa. I darken some of my darks but also lighten my midtones and highlights. You can copy my values (14, 1.51, 181) if you like, or skip this step if you feel your image is already up to par.

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 to bring up Image Size. From here, we will size it down from the high resolution file to something tiny.

I size mine down to a width of 75 pixels.  That’s roughly two percent 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 percent of it’s new size. You’ll get better results if you use multiples, like 200 percent (2x) or 1000 percent (10x).

Voila, we’ve created simple, blocky goodness from an ordinary graphic!

You can scale this up to any size you want and it will keep this look, as long as you resize in multiples, ie. you don’t blow it up to 133 percent, but rather 200 percent, 400 percent, etc. (You want to preserve the grid you created when you shrunk it in the first place.)

Here are some other examples of this process.

I think I need a poster or maybe a T-Shirt of this one!

They’re simple to create and have a lot of possibilities outside the world of public domain fine artworks. Use your imagination and have fun with it!