Commodore 64 Photo Converter — Examples & Guide

How to get authentic Commodore 64 graphics from your photo

The VIC-II chip's 16-colour limit is important, every choice below is about working with that constraint the way C64 software did.

Any image works. Upload whatever you like. For the most authentic result, crop to 4:3 landscape first and turn off "Use image aspect ratio". This is optional and explained below.

1

Upload a photo

Drag and drop it onto "LOAD IMAGE" or click to select. Photos with clear, separated colour areas convert most convincingly, the VIC-II palette can't do subtle gradients.

2

Choose a palette

Extract from Image picks 16 adaptive colours from your photo via k-means clustering which gives a richer, closer colour match. VIC-II Chip Palette locks to the real, fixed 16-colour C64 palette, less accurate to the source photo, but the authentic period-correct look.

3

Pick a graphics mode

Three conversion modes, each suited to a different kind of photo — see the table below for a quick pick, or the full explanation further down the page.

Mode	Best for	Avoid for
320×200	Photos, landscapes, skies — any soft gradient	—
Multicolor	Game-art style images, medium-contrast subjects	Flat skies, smooth gradients
Hires	Portraits, logos, line art — sharp, high-contrast subjects	Soft photo landscapes, hazy skies

4

Pick a dithering algorithm

Floyd-Steinberg for smooth photographic gradients, Bayer Ordered for the crisp geometric grid pattern that resembles hand-placed C64 pixel art. Commodore 64 had no automatic dithering, this just approximates the look. Atkinson for a softer diffusion that suits portraits, or No Dither for a flat, blocky raw-palette look.

5

Fine-tune and save

Adjust brightness, contrast and saturation (and K-Means quality, if using Extract from Image) to taste, then hit SAVE to download the finished image. Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded to a server.

Settings for the most authentic result

Any image converts fine at any shape. These only matter if you want to match a real C64 screen, which always filled a 4:3 TV:

Crop to 4:3 before uploading (standard camera or old TV proportions).
Use landscape. Portrait images get squished or heavily cropped.
Turn off "Use image aspect ratio" so the converter fills the whole screen instead of leaving letterbox bars. The same 4:3 crop applies to Multicolor and Hires.
Feed it 640×480 or larger so the downsampler has enough detail.
Use the fixed VIC-II Chip Palette, not Extract from Image. The real C64 could only show its own 16 hardware colours.

Open C64 Converter

Four dithering algorithms

Floyd-Steinberg — Classic error diffusion. Smooth gradients, minimal patterning. Best for photos with fine tonal range.
Bayer 4×4 — Ordered dithering. Crisp, geometric grid pattern — the look most retro converters (this one included) reach for as a stand-in for hand-placed C64 pixel art.
Atkinson — Apple Mac era diffusion. Softer than Floyd-Steinberg, spreads error over more neighbours, great for portraits.
No Dither — Raw palette mapping. Produces blocky, flat-colour look — the most extreme 8-bit aesthetic.

Dithering creates the illusion of more colours by mixing pixels in patterns that trick the eye into seeing a blend — mixing light blue and white dots to suggest sky blue, for instance. The Commodore 64 itself had no automatic dithering: with the VIC-II chip's strict 16-colour limit, pixel artists placed every dithered dot by hand. The automatic algorithms here (Bayer included) are a modern convenience real C64 software never had, commonly used by retro converters to approximate that hand-placed look. Read more about the VIC-II 16-colour palette.

Three CBM64 resolutions & colour modes

320×200 — Hires (attribute clash — high contrast) 320×200 — Standard (no clash — photos & landscapes) 160×200 — Multicolour (attribute clash)

Hires and Multicolour apply the real VIC-II per-cell colour limit; Standard renders the same 320×200 resolution without it, so it's the better pick for continuous-tone photos where the cell constraint would just look blocky.

Open C64 Converter