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Usually, designers try to reduce pixelation in their images, and keep designs crisp and clean. The Pixelated look can actually add a flare of personality to a design however. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a quick and easy way to pixelate your graphics.

Pixelation

I recently had someone express interest in creating Pixelated images.  If you’re not familiar with the term, Pixelation is the result of stretching raster graphics or bitmaps.  When stretching image data beyond it’s maximum size, the individual pixels which make up an image can be easily seen as they are also increased in size.

Example of Pixelation:

Typically, Pixelation is a bad thing to have in practice.  Designers and Photographers usually want ther images crisp and smooth as shown in the upper left frame.

However, Pixelation can also be used as a technique which enhances compositions, and has become a style of it’s own.

How To Pixelate a Graphic

There are a few ways to go about pixelating images.  The easiest way is probably by putting the Mosaic Filter to good use (especially when you want to work with individual layers).

Open up a graphic you’d like to work with:

Select the layer you’d like to Pixelate.  Apply the Mosaic Filter onto this layer (Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic).   A Mosaic Settings Box will pop up.  Move the slider to adjust the size of the pixels.

That’s really all it takes to pixelate a graphic in Adobe Photoshop!