Harmonize

Step 6 · Shadow grounds your sprites; Step 7 · Harmonize is the last polish pass before you stage and export. It does two jobs in one panel. First it heals every fill the AI rebuilt behind your sprites back at Step 5 · Mask Sprites, pulling each one's color, sharpness, and grain toward the real art around it. Then, optionally, it repixelizes the whole scene — background plus every layer and sprite — onto a true pixel grid at a resolution you choose. A live Harmonize Preview fills the left of the panel; two stacked racks on the right hold the heal passes and the repixelize controls. Nothing here applies while you sit on the step — there is no Apply button. Both jobs run when you press Continue to Reconstruct & View, and the result is baked into the document so Step 8 · Reconstruct & View and every export ride on the harmonized pixels. You are done when the heal readouts read the way you want (or honestly say no-op) and you have picked an output resolution — or turned repixelize off.

The live preview

The left pane, headed Harmonize Preview, is a zoomable render of the whole scene at the current output resolution and heal settings. It re-renders on its own whenever you touch anything on the right — a small updating badge flashes in the corner while a new resample computes, and Rendering preview… shows before the first frame lands. The image is drawn pixelated so you can inspect the real grid, and the alpha checkerboard shows through any transparent areas. The sub-line under the heading tells you what the pass will do; with ★ Repixelize off it switches to remind you the scene keeps its original generated size.

The view controls sit in the header. Fit resets zoom and pan so the whole scene fits the viewport, and highlights when you are already fitted. 100% zooms so one output pixel equals one screen pixel — use it to check the true grid after repixelizing. The {n}% chip prints the current zoom and, clicked, resets it like Fit. The indigo {W} × {H} px badge is a read-only readout of the current output dimensions — the target when repixelize is on, the source size when it is off. As on every other canvas, scroll to zoom and drag to pan.

Heal AI fills

The top rack, Heal AI fills · region-scoped, runs three self-measuring passes over each AI-reconstructed sprite fill — the sprites the AI rebuilt behind other objects at Step 5 · Mask Sprites. Every pass measures the fill's drift against a 16 px ring of the real art around it first and skips itself when the fill already matches, so leaving all three on is safe. They only touch visible, reconstructed sprites; painted and original pixels are never modified, and alpha is never touched — only pixels with alpha of 32 or more are healed, so keyed edges stay exactly as you left them. A live readout beside each pass reports the measured drift or no-op.

1. Color match (on by default) — an OKLab statistics transfer, matching the mean and spread of each fill's color to the ring of source art around it. This is the fix for a fill that came back oversaturated, washed out, or off-palette. The readout shows ΔE {n} when it will act and no-op — fills match when the drift is within tolerance. Two sub-controls appear while it is on: a strength slider (10–100%, default 80%) sets how far the transfer pulls, and palette snap — pull fills to the source palette snaps healed pixels to the palette sampled from the surrounding art. In pixel-art mode palette snap is exact and its label appends (pixel art: exact); for soft art it snaps only near-misses so gradients stay smooth.
2. Sharpness match (on by default) — matches the surrounding art's edge crispness, sharpening a too-soft, bucket-resampled fill or gently softening one that came back over-crisp. The readout shows ratio {n} when it will act and no-op when the ratio is within tolerance.
3. Grain match (on by default) — re-applies the missing high-frequency noise so a too-clean fill stops looking pasted on. It is deterministic, so a bake reproduces exactly. The readout shows ratio {n} or no-op. In pixel-art mode this pass is force-skipped — grain would break the grid — and its readout reads skipped — pixel mode.
4. ▶ Preview heals on this scene — paints the healed result over a clone of the preview so you can judge the effect before committing. The button flips to ◼ Previewing heals — click to revert. It is a look only; the document itself does not change until the bake. The button is disabled when the project has no reconstructed fills.

Below the passes, a status line reads how many fills the heals apply to at the Step 8 bake, plus the last bake's heal note. If the project has no reconstructed sprites, it turns amber: the passes have nothing to heal.

Repixelize — bake to a pixel grid

The lower rack, Transform · whole image, resamples the entire scene onto a chosen resolution, committing one hard color per output pixel so pixel art stays crisp where an ordinary filter would smear. Turn it on to force any art — painted included — onto a true pixel grid; off, the whole size-and-algorithm section below collapses away.

1. ★ Repixelize — the master on/off switch. On, the scene bakes to a pixel grid and exports switch to nearest-neighbor filtering; off, nothing is resampled and the pixel-size controls hide, and exports keep whatever filtering the source style implied — still nearest if the intake was pixel art. Its default follows the pixel-art decision from Step 1 · Generate or Upload — on for pixel-art intakes, off for painterly or photographic ones — but you can override it here at any time.
2. Pixel size presets 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 — four buttons that set the output to the source divided by N, so a bigger number means chunkier pixels. The preset matching the current output size highlights, and the current size echoes as {n} px above them.
3. Output size — directly editable output width and height. The aspect ratio is locked (edit one side and the other rewrites itself) and both are capped at the source dimensions — this step only ever downsamples, never upscales. Typing an exact size is the one way to reach fractional pixel sizes such as 4.48; the preset buttons are integer-only.
4. Algorithm — how each output pixel's color is committed from its source cell. K-centroid (the default) runs a per-cell k-means and is best for AI or painterly sources, keeping small features other methods average away. Dominant color takes the most common color per cell, cleaning noise and anti-aliasing without inventing new colors. Sharp (nearest) is exact point sampling — the fastest, but ragged on fractional pixel sizes.

Continue to Reconstruct & View

There is no Apply button. When you press Continue to Reconstruct & View, Pixploder runs the enabled heal passes first, then the ★ Repixelize resample — only when it is on and the target differs from the source — and bakes the result into the working document. From there, Step 8's diorama and every export (PSD, Unity, sprite sheet, PNG stack, JSON) ride on the harmonized, repixelized pixels. Both operations share one snapshot, so the bake is never permanent until you export: going back from Step 8 · Reconstruct & View restores the pre-bake, full-resolution document, and re-entering re-bakes with your current settings.

The note above the button forecasts this — that the next step and every export use this resolution and that going back restores the full document, or, with repixelize off, that nothing is resampled. On Step 8, a fuchsia baked · <filtering> · N AI fills healed chip records what Harmonize actually did — for example baked · nearest · 3 AI fills healed · worst drift ΔE 6.4. Its tooltip repeats the heal note and the export filtering.