Koadro vs Phosphor Press

Turn any photo into pixel art you actually control, one pixel at a time. Pick a photo, a painting, a screenshot, a landscape, a pet, a face, and Koadro rebuilds it in real pixels. You decide the resolution. You decide how many colors. Every pixel comes straight from your picture, and every choice is yours. Make a piece you are proud of, or just have fun turning today's photo into pixels. Freedom to make it your way: - Set the resolution, from chunky retro blocks to fine detail. - Hold the color count wherever your eye likes it. - Choose a named palette, Mono, Nord, Noir, Matcha, Sepia, Dusk, Van Gogh, Ukiyo-e, Riso, CGA, or PICO-8, or let Koadro read an adaptive palette straight from your image. - Build your own palettes and save the looks you love. - Add texture and dithering for that classic pixel feel. - Go monochrome in any color, from a few tones to sixteen. - Finish it with effects: lines to count every tile, outlines around each shape, beads like a pegboard, or relief like glazed ceramic. - Crop and rotate freely, your original always kept, and Enhance readies each photo before it becomes pixels. - Or switch to Mosaic and rebuild the whole picture from tessellating tiles: square, triangle, diamond, hexagon. - Transparent backgrounds stay transparent: a cutout goes in, a clean pixel sticker comes out. Make what you like: a pixel avatar or PFP for your profile, a sprite for a game, a sticker, or a whole collection of your favorite images in pixels. How it works: 1. Pick any photo, or take one on iPhone or iPad. 2. Set the resolution and the number of colors. 3. Choose a palette, or pull one from the image itself. 4. Add dithering, effects, or a mosaic of tiles. 5. Export a crisp PNG, or a PDF that prints sharp at any size, and use it however you like. The free tier is a real tool, not a trial. Resolution up to 128 cells, up to 16 colors, every built-in palette, dithering, the lines and outlines effects, crop, rotate and Enhance, transparent backgrounds, square and triangle mosaics, export up to 1024px, and 10 projects. No watermark on any of it. Koadro Premium, one purchase, unlocks the rest: resolution up to 256 cells, up to 64 colors, monochrome in any color with up to 16 tones, diamond and hexagon mosaics, the beads and relief effects, exact sizing in centimeters or inches, export up to 4096px and to PDF, custom palettes, saved presets, and unlimited projects. Pay once. No subscription. No ads. No watermark. Ever. Everything runs on your device. No account, no cloud, no upload. Your images never leave your hands. Anything you can picture, in pixels. You make every decision, Koadro just makes it easy.

Phosphor Press turns a photograph into the kind of picture a machine would have shown you before it could show everything: a few tones, a visible grain, and hard pixel edges. Not a filter laid over your photo. The picture is taken apart and rebuilt on a palette of two, four or sixteen colours, with the dithering that made those palettes bearable in the first place. SCREENS AND PRINT Paper — dark ink on warm paper, four tones. The one to start with. Ink — the same, at two tones, for a woodcut edge. Amber and Green Terminal — the monochrome monitors, at two levels or four. Inked 256 — full colour under hard black outlines. CGA 1984, CGA Outline, EGA Adventure — the hardware palettes, matched in a perceptual colour space so four colours still look deliberate. Mosaic — your photo's own colours in big square blocks. CONTROLS THAT DO SOMETHING Pixel size, from a coarse mosaic to a fine grain. Period screen modes keep their original non-square pixels, so 320x200 looks the way it did on a real monitor. Outlines that follow shapes rather than brightness. The app segments the picture into regions and draws the boundaries between them, so a line closes around an object instead of breaking up wherever contrast dips. Even lighting, which divides out the light in a scene so a surface split by a shadow stays one colour instead of becoming two objects. Auto levels, contrast, saturation, flattening, and frame shapes from square to 16:9 with a manual crop. WHAT IT IS GOOD AT Strong shapes and clear contrast: architecture, landscapes, silhouettes, objects against a plain background, anything backlit. A photograph reduced to four tones keeps what a silhouette is made of. It is honest about the rest. Fine texture — hair, foliage close up, crowds — is what these palettes have to throw away, and portraits are the hardest subject of all. Monochrome handles them better than the colour palettes do. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no server. The app works with the network switched off entirely. Your photos are read, converted and shown back to you, and they go somewhere else only when you save or share them yourself. FREE, AND PRO Every palette, every dither mode and every frame size are free, forever. Phosphor Press Pro is a single one-time purchase. It removes the signature from exports, adds CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, aperture grille, vignette — adaptive palettes picked from your own photo, exports up to eight times the pixel size, and your own saved presets, exportable to another device.