K-Means Color Quantization
A reduction of an image to a small palette found by k-means clustering, a technique dating to the 1950s and 1960s. It yields posterized, poster-like art and compact images that keep their dominant colors.
Spot it
- 01Few flat dominant colors
- 02Posterized hard bands
- 03Gradients broken into steps
Why it happens
Treats pixel colors as points in color space, groups them into k clusters by repeatedly assigning to the nearest center and recomputing centers, then paints each pixel with its cluster's center.
Recreate it in Pixio
Image edit prompt“Apply k-means color quantization to this image: reduce it to exactly eight dominant flat colors chosen from the image itself, with smooth gradients turned into hard posterized bands, no dithering, no outlines. Keep the colors faithful to the original palette. Keep the original subject and composition recognizable.”
Open PixioUpload your image and pick an image-edit model.