The Depixelizer

A few days ago Morgan McGuire added a post on his blog about the absence of a good cross platform tool for depixelizing pixel art for higher resolutions purposes.

I’ve also faced this problem when jamming, but not wanting to invest tons of my own time into developing a native cross platform solution, compiling it on every platform, and then building installers ick, I thought – maybe it will work as a webtool?

So I scoured the net for a good implementation of the hq4x algorithm in javascript that Morgan referenced, found one on github and then built a solution around the library.  All in all, I’d say I put 8 hours into it, just finding the right javascript libraries and stitching everything together.  The more I mess with modern web tech the more impressed I am in the kinds of tools that can be built in the browser.  It’s not great for a lot of things, but it’s definitely got some advantages in the case of making cross platform simple tools that would typically be command line (unfriendly) tools.

If you have a chance, check out The Depixelizer!