Photo to sketch

How to turn a photo into a sketch

1. Open the photo. Tap Choose a photo, drop the file on the box, or copy a picture and press Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac). A phone photo is turned upright by its orientation tag first.
2. Pick a style. Pencil for grey lines on white, Charcoal for heavy strokes on textured paper, Coloured pencil to keep the photo's colours, Outline for pure black lines to trace, Colouring page for a whole printable sheet of bold, closed black lines, Embroidery pattern for fine lines fitted inside your hoop at true size.
3. Tune it. Line softness sets how wide the shading reaches (higher = broader, softer strokes); Darkness deepens every grey. For outlines and colouring pages, Detail decides how faint an edge still gets a line, and Remove specks clears freckles of noise; a colouring page also has Line weight in millimetres, Close gaps, Simplify, a border and a title line.
4. Compare. Drag the handle across the picture (or use the arrow keys) to see the photo on the left and the sketch on the right.
5. Save or print. Download PNG (crisp, best for outlines) or JPG (smaller, quality 50 to 100) at full size, or pick A4 or Letter and press Print for a page fitted inside 10 mm margins. A colouring page also downloads as an SVG of traced paths; an embroidery pattern downloads as a true-size PDF.

What it cannot do

• It is a filter, not AI. It traces the light and dark that is already in the photo. It will not redraw a face in an artist's hand, tidy a messy background or invent detail a blurry photo does not have.
• Busy backgrounds make busy sketches. Leaves, crowds and patterned wallpaper all become lines. Crop the photo close to the subject first, or raise Remove specks for outlines.
• Very large photos are slow on old phones. The preview is drawn small, but the full-size file is made at the photo's own size; a 24 MP photo takes a few seconds on a laptop and can take much longer, or run out of memory, on an older phone.
• Photos over 24 megapixels are scaled down to 24 MP (the page says so and gives the new size).
• Flat, evenly lit areas turn to white paper, and very dark photos give faint sketches; a photo with clear light and shade works best.
• A colouring page follows edges, not objects. It cannot tell a face from the wallpaper behind it, so a cluttered photo gives a cluttered page; raise Simplify or crop first. Gap closing only bridges gaps up to the distance you set (5 mm at most), so a wide gap in a faint edge stays open.
• The SVG is filled shapes, not single strokes. Each line is traced as an outlined black shape, which suits cutting machines, print shops and vinyl, but a pen plotter will draw both edges of every line.
• Embroidery: no machine files. The pattern is a printed line drawing for hand stitching; it does not make .pes, .dst or any other machine embroidery file.
• Embroidery: it does not choose stitches. You get the lines and, if you want it, a thread key; whether an area is satin, long-and-short, seed stitch or left empty is up to you.
• Thread colours on screen are approximate. Each number comes from a published table of sRGB values for each thread colour; real thread, your screen and your printer all differ, so check the numbers against a colour card or the skeins in daylight.
• The PDF is only true size at 100 %. A print dialog set to "Fit to page" shrinks it; measure the 10 cm check line before you transfer.
• Nothing is saved. Close the tab and the sketch is gone, so download it first.

How the pencil look is made

The classic "pencil sketch" recipe is four steps. The photo is turned to grey (0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B); a copy is inverted and blurred; then the grey is colour-dodged over the blurred negative: result = grey × 255 ÷ (255 − blurred negative), capped at 255. Where nothing changes, the two cancel out exactly and you get white paper (grey 128 over a blurred negative of 127 gives 128 × 255 ÷ 128 = 255). At an edge, the blur spills dark into light, so the division falls short and leaves a grey stroke. A darkness curve (a power of 1 to 5) then deepens the strokes without touching the white.

A worked pixel: grey 100 next to an edge where the blurred negative is 55 gives 100 × 255 ÷ 200 = 127.5, a mid-grey line; at darkness 40 (power 2.6) it becomes about 42, a firm pencil mark.

How the colouring page is made

The page is laid out first: A4 is 210 × 297 mm, so at 300 DPI it is 2,480 × 3,508 pixels, and the photo is fitted inside the 10 mm margins (2,244 pixels across on A4 portrait). Edges are found as in Outline, at a blur of 0.12 mm (Simplify 0) up to 0.7 mm (Simplify 5), so a higher level skips fine texture such as hair and grass. The black bands along each edge are thinned to one-pixel centre lines, line pieces too small to matter are dropped, and every loose line end is joined to the nearest other line within the gap distance. Last, each centre line is drawn with a round pen of the chosen weight: 1.0 mm is 11.8 pixels at 300 DPI, which prints as a line a crayon can follow. The SVG is the finished page traced into filled paths, sized 210 × 297 mm (or 215.9 × 279.4 mm for Letter), so it prints at the same scale.

How the embroidery pattern is made

The lines are the same edge lines as the colouring page (two blurs, a threshold, thinned to centre lines, specks dropped, small gaps joined), drawn with a much finer pen: 0.3 to 0.8 mm on the fabric, 0.5 mm by default, fine enough that a backstitch or split stitch in two or three strands hides it. Every size is set in millimetres of fabric and the file is made at 300 DPI.

The hoop sizes are nominal sizes, which are close to the inside of the inner ring; if yours differs, measure across the inside and pick the nearest. The picture is fitted inside that inner edge less the margin: with the whole picture kept, its corners touch the inner circle, so a square photo in a 15 cm hoop with a 10 mm margin (a 130 mm circle) is 130 ÷ √2 ≈ 91.9 mm a side; with Fill the hoop the picture covers the 130 mm circle and its corners are trimmed. A wide or tall photo turns an oval hoop sideways to match.

A 15 cm hoop plus its 15 mm seam allowance ring is 180 mm across, which fits inside the 10 mm margins of A4 (190 mm across) and Letter (196 mm), so it prints on one sheet. An 18 or 20 cm hoop needs two sheets and a 25 cm hoop four; neighbouring sheets repeat 10 mm of the drawing, with blue + marks every 40 mm in that strip so you can lay one sheet over the next and tape them. The thread key groups the photo's colours inside the hoop into the number you ask for (k-means in the OKLab colour space), then gives each group the thread colour number whose colour is nearest in OKLab, from a table of 454 numbered thread colours published under the MIT licence (source and licence). Its share is the part of the picture area inside the hoop that the colour covers, which tells you which colours you need most, not how many skeins.

Questions

How do I turn a photo into a sketch online for free?

Open the photo on this page and the pencil sketch appears straight away; tap Charcoal, Coloured pencil, Outline or Colouring page to switch style, and drag the before/after handle to compare. Download the result as PNG or JPG at the photo's full size (up to 24 megapixels). There is no sign-up, no credit counter and no watermark, because everything runs in your browser.

How do I turn a photo into line art?

Choose Outline or Colouring page. Both blur the photo at two sizes and draw black wherever the smaller blur is darker than the bigger one by more than a threshold, which happens along the dark side of every edge; more Detail lowers the threshold. Outline keeps those lines at the photo's own size with a thickness in pixels. Colouring page thins them to centre lines and redraws them at an even weight in millimetres, and its SVG download holds the lines as traced vector paths for a cutting machine or a print shop. Every pixel is pure black or pure white.

Is this photo to sketch converter AI?

No. It uses classic image filters (blur, colour dodge, edge detection) with numbers you can set, so the same photo and settings always give the same result in a few seconds at most. It will not redraw a face in an artist's style or add detail that is not in the photo, which is what AI sketch services do; in return nothing is uploaded and nothing is invented.

How do I turn a photo into a coloring page?

Choose Colouring page, pick A4 or Letter, and press Print or download the PNG. The page lays the photo out on the whole sheet inside 10 mm margins at 300 DPI and draws its edges as pure black lines on white, with no grey shading. Line weight is set in millimetres on the printed page (0.5 to 2.0, default 1.0, which is 11.8 pixels at 300 DPI); line ends within the Close gaps distance (default 1.5 mm) are joined so the shapes close and colour stays in; line pieces whose ink would cover less than the minimum area (default 2 mm²) are removed as specks. Add a page border and a blank title line if you want them. It works best on a photo with one clear subject on a plain background. For a page made from a child's name rather than a photo, use the Name Coloring Page maker.

How do I turn a photo into a hand embroidery pattern?

Open the photo, choose Embroidery pattern and pick your hoop: round 10, 13, 15, 18, 20 or 25 cm (4 to 10 in) or an oval. The photo's edges become fine lines (0.3 to 0.8 mm) fitted inside the hoop's inner edge less a margin you set (10 mm by default), with the hoop drawn as a red dashed line and a grey ring 15 mm outside it as the seam allowance. Tick Mirror if you will trace it with an iron-on transfer pen or pencil. Download the PDF and print it at 100 % (Actual size) on A4 or Letter: the 10 cm check line on every sheet tells you the scale is right, and a hoop bigger than the sheet is split over several sheets that overlap by 10 mm with + marks to line them up. Tick Thread key for a sheet of 2 to 12 colours from the photo, each with the nearest thread colour number, its name and its share of the area.

What size and format is the download?

The same width and height as your photo, after it is turned upright by its orientation tag, up to 24 megapixels; a bigger photo is scaled down to 24 MP and the page tells you the new size. PNG keeps outlines perfectly crisp; JPG is smaller and has a quality slider. Neither keeps the original's EXIF data, so the camera model, date and GPS location are not in the file. A colouring page is the whole sheet instead: 2,480 × 3,508 px for A4 or 2,550 × 3,300 px for Letter (300 DPI), as PNG or as a traced SVG.