Pixelate images with Canvas

・2 min read

There may be cases in which you want to pixelate an image, such as creating 8-bit style pixel art themed games or you simply want to give a hint of what an image is about without exposing too much. Turns out that it’s not complicated at all to do pixelation with canvas.

View demo »

The main methods needed from the canvas context are imageSmoothingEnabled for rendering crisp pixels and drawImage for drawing those pixels on to the canvas context.

Essentially how it works is we scale down the image and stretch it to a larger size.

Here is the gist:

// Create new image element.
var image = new Image();

// Set an image.
image.src = 'photo.png';

// Append image to body.
document.body.appendChild(image);

// After image has been loaded in memory invoke a callback.
image.onload = imageLoaded;

// Image loaded callback.
function imageLoaded() {

  // Get the dimensions of loaded image.
  var width = image.clientWidth;
  var height = image.clientHeight;

  // Create canvas element.
  var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
  canvas.width = width;
  canvas.height = height;

  // This is what gives us that blocky pixel styling, rather than a blend between pixels.
  canvas.style.cssText = 'image-rendering: optimizeSpeed;' + // FireFox < 6.0
                         'image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;' + // FireFox
                         'image-rendering: -o-crisp-edges;' +  // Opera
                         'image-rendering: -webkit-crisp-edges;' + // Chrome
                         'image-rendering: crisp-edges;' + // Chrome
                         'image-rendering: -webkit-optimize-contrast;' + // Safari
                         'image-rendering: pixelated; ' + // Future browsers
                         '-ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor;'; // IE

  // Grab the drawing context object. It's what lets us draw on the canvas.
  var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

  // Use nearest-neighbor scaling when images are resized instead of the resizing algorithm to create blur.
  context.webkitImageSmoothingEnabled = false;
  context.mozImageSmoothingEnabled = false;
  context.msImageSmoothingEnabled = false;
  context.imageSmoothingEnabled = false;

  // We'll be pixelating the image by 80% (20% of original size).
  var percent = 0.2;

  // Calculate the scaled dimensions.
  var scaledWidth = width * percent;
  var scaledHeight = height * percent;

  // Render image smaller.
  context.drawImage(image, 0, 0, scaledWidth, scaledHeight);

  // Stretch the smaller image onto larger context.
  context.drawImage(canvas, 0, 0, scaledWidth, scaledHeight, 0, 0, width, height);

  // Here are what the above parameters mean:
  // canvasElement, canvasXOffsetForImage, canvasYOffsetForImage, imageWidth, imageHeight, imageXOffset, imageYOffset, destinationImageWidth, destinationImageHeight

  // Append canvas to body.
  document.body.appendChild(canvas);
}

View demo »

For your convenience I abstracted it into a tiny library, pixelate.js, which lets you replace image src attributes with a generated dataURL of the pixelated image.

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