🅐 Image Pixelate

Expect a classic mosaic and you'll be a little wrong, but in a good way. 🅐 Image Pixelate doesn't just blur your image into big squares - it converts it to grayscale, crunches it down, and redraws every "pixel" as a round dot whose color comes from a palette you control. The result is that chunky dot-matrix / halftone look rather than straight-up Minecraft blocks. It's a stylistic filter with a specific flavor, and knowing that flavor up front is the difference between loving it and wondering what went wrong.

How it works

The required images input takes your IMAGE batch. pixel_size (default 8, range 1–64) sets how big each dot is in pixels - higher means chunkier. Then palette_colors is the fun part: a multiline list of hex colors, one per line, with a greenish grayscale ramp as the default:

121212
31342F
555F50
7E8C77
9DA09B

The node does its work in three steps: it converts the image to grayscale, downsamples it by pixel_size to get an average tone per cell, then draws an ellipse for each cell filled with the palette color that best matches that cell's brightness. Because the source is grayscale, color comes entirely from your palette - this is a tone-mapped dot rendering, not a color-preserving pixelation.

Inputs and outputs

• images - IMAGE, required.
• pixel_size - INT, default 8, 1–64.
• palette_colors - STRING, multiline, hex per line.
• Output: IMAGE.

Where you'd use it

It's a stylizer, pure and simple: throw a render or a photo in, get an instant retro-dot look out. The palette is the real control - swap in a two-color list for a stark duotone poster effect, or a bright set for something playful. Worth noting the output is a full-resolution image with the dot grid drawn across it, so you can feed it back into img2img to composite the effect onto a clean version.

Install

Part of hay86/ComfyUI_AceNodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/hay86/ComfyUI_AceNodes
cd ComfyUI_AceNodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI and look for 🅐 Image Pixelate under Ace Nodes. Manager users search ComfyUI_AceNodes.

Gotchas

The circles-not-squares thing is the main one to internalize - if you wanted true square pixels, this isn't that, and there's no square mode. Also, since it converts to grayscale first, a colorful image will lose its hue and come back entirely palette-driven; feed it a palette that contains the colors you actually want in the output. The default palette is a moody green-gray ramp, not a neutral gray, so your first result may look slightly green. That's the node working as designed, not a bug. And as always, the pack's heavy requirements.txt installs regardless.