How can I convert an image's pixels to actual LEGO colors? The LEGO Group released a few "mosaic" sets a while back, which came with clear baseplates and a bunch of 1x1 bricks. I have been wondering recently if it is possible to use an image as a reference when building one of these.



Unfortunately, this is hard because digital images can have a lot more colors than there are actual LEGO colors.

I am not interested in anything more than 1x1 bricks on a baseplate, regardless of the fact that the image has some other bricks added onto those 1x1s. The scenes which I would be interested in building would effectively be two-dimensional.

Is there perhaps a way (besides approximating) to change the pixels of an image into actual LEGO colors? Is there perhaps some type of web-application for this?

Related: How many different colours of LEGO bricks are there?
You can use GIMP for this.
First you need to scale the image to the size you want. (If you want to stack bricks on top of each other instead of a baseplate, use a different y-scaling to correspond the bricks height.)

Now create a palette by going to the Palette tab and click the "New palette" icon.


In this add the bricks colors you want. You can find the colors RGB values to a brick color here: http://www.peeron.com/cgi-bin/invcgis/colorguide.cgi

Now convert into these colors by going to "Image->Mode->Indexed...". (If indexed is already selected, select RGB first and then click Indexed.) A "Convert Image to Indexed Colors" dialog box should appear.


Select "Use custom palette" and select the palette you just created.

Click "Convert" to get your result. If you are not quite satisfied, click undo and try to change/add some colors in your custom palette and convert again.