MagicPixel

Color management & palettes

Pixel art lives and dies by its palette. MagicPixel ships with a full set of color tools: palettes, hue remapping, an eyedropper and palette extraction, all designed to keep your project visually cohesive even when you mix hand-drawn and AI-generated work. Need a starting point? Browse the pixel art color palette library and add any of them to your account in one click.

Browse 256 free pixel art color palettes

Hardware classics and themed ramps with every hex code listed, ready to copy or save straight into the editor.

Open palette library

Common workflows

Rather not build one from scratch? The palette library has hardware classics and themed ramps with every hex code listed, ready to save straight into the editor.

Import a downloaded palette

  1. 1Download a palette as a .hex file from any palette site, or export one from Aseprite or GIMP (.gpl and .pal also work).
  2. 2Drag the file anywhere onto the editor: MagicPixel detects palette files and opens the importer.
  3. 3Preview the swatches, give the palette a name, and save.
  4. 4Click the new palette in the Palette panel to make it the active one.

Build a project palette from AI output

  1. 1Generate a few sprites with the look you want.
  2. 2Right-click your favorite artboard → "Create palette from artboard…".
  3. 3Toggle "Distinct hues" to keep the palette compact, deselect any noisy AA colors, and name it.
  4. 4Switch to that palette so future generations and manual touch-ups stay on-style.

Add colors from one sprite to your palette

  1. 1Set the palette you want to grow as the active one.
  2. 2Right-click the sprite that has the colors you like.
  3. 3Pick "Add artboard colors to <palette>…" and check the swatches you want to keep.
  4. 4Confirm: duplicates are skipped, and presets are auto-cloned to a custom palette.

Reskin an asset to a project palette

  1. 1Right-click the artboard (or multi-select several) → "Normalize…".
  2. 2Open the "Snap to Palette" dropdown and pick your target palette.
  3. 3Preview the result; tweak brush size or alpha threshold if needed, then confirm.
  4. 4Lossy on color count: duplicate the artboard first if you want to keep the original.

Recolor a sprite to a new theme

  1. 1Select the part you want to recolor (Magic Wand on a single color, or Lasso for a region).
  2. 2Open Color Remap and click the dominant color you want to shift.
  3. 3Drag Hue to retarget, then nudge Saturation and Lightness for the right mood.
  4. 4Apply to commit: undo if you don’t love it; the source stays intact until you do.

In depth

Pick a palette before you draw

A constrained palette is what makes pixel art look like pixel art. Open the Palette panel on the right and pick one of the presets (PICO-8, Game Boy, Warm Earth…), build a custom one, import a palette file, or extract colors from an existing artboard. Drawing tools, pencil, fill and color picker, all work best when paired with a palette you commit to.

Create custom palettes

Hit the "+" in the palette panel to start a new custom palette, or duplicate a preset to use as a starting point. Custom palettes are saved to your account and you can keep up to 20 at a time.

Import a palette file

Drag a .gpl (GIMP / Aseprite), .pal (JASC), or .hex (paint.net style) file anywhere onto the editor and MagicPixel routes it to the palette importer instead of treating it as an image. You can also open the Palette panel menu and pick "Import palette…". After parsing you get a swatch preview and a chance to rename before saving. 256 KB cap per file; imports count toward the 20-palette custom limit. Any palette file exported from another editor or downloaded from a community palette site works.

Extract a palette from any artboard

Right-click an artboard and pick "Create palette from artboard…" to harvest its colors into a brand new palette. Or pick "Add artboard colors to <current palette>…" to merge them into the palette you’re already using: perfect when you’ve been generating with AI and want to lock in the colors you actually liked. The dialog lets you preview swatches and choose between every unique color (cap 256) or a smaller set of distinct hues.

Snap colors to a target palette

Two entry points: when importing any PNG / JPG / GIF the Import dialog has a "Snap to Palette" dropdown that remaps every pixel to the nearest color in a chosen palette before the artboard is created. For art already on the canvas, right-click an artboard → "Normalize…" to reopen the same dialog and apply (or change) Snap to Palette retroactively: also works on a multi-selection for batch re-normalize. Set it to Off to preserve original colors.

Use the eyedropper liberally

Press I to switch to the eyedropper, then click anywhere on the canvas to sample a color: it becomes your active drawing color. If it’s not already in your active palette, the swatch in the toolbar lets you add it with a single click: useful for capturing AI-generated colors mid-edit.

Color Remap is your color-grading tool

Open the Color Remap panel to shift hue, saturation, lightness, and alpha across the artboard, an active selection, or multiple artboards at once. It buckets the source pixels into distinct hues so you can grab "all the reds" or "all the dark grays" with a single click: much faster than recoloring pixel by pixel.

Hue shifts beat blanket recoloring

Want a green version of your blue knight? Don’t fill-bucket the whole sprite: pick the dominant blue in Color Remap and drag the Hue slider. The tool preserves shading relationships, so highlights and shadows stay coherent. For a stronger reskin, also nudge Saturation slightly down and Lightness up.

Recolor a selection, not the whole sprite

Combine the Magic Wand or Lasso with Color Remap to retint just one part of a sprite: a cape without touching armor, or warm only the highlights. Anything in your selection is what gets remapped; with no selection, Color Remap operates on the active artboard.

Background removal is a color tool

Generated art arrives with a solid background. The Background Removal tool flood-fills colors close to the corner pixels with a tight tolerance and a small edge-fringe clean-up: it preserves details inside the artwork. For best results, set a strongly contrasting background (saturated magenta or lime) before generating so the AI fills it consistently and removal is surgical.

Pair palettes with AI generation

Mention your target palette in the prompt ("16-color GBC palette", "muted pastel set, 8 colors") and you’ll get closer-to-on-style results. Then extract the resulting colors with the right-click action above, save them as a custom palette, and reuse it across the rest of the project for consistency.

Smaller palettes look better

It’s tempting to pile every color you’ve ever liked into one palette. Don’t. 8 to 16 carefully chosen colors will outperform 64 random ones. Limited palettes force readable contrast, group related materials, and give your project a unified look.