How the converter works, what the settings do, and what happens to your photograph.
Yes. Every chart, every download, no account and no watermark. There is nothing to buy and nothing held back for a paid version.
The conversion runs entirely in your browser: your picture is never uploaded or examined to build the chart. Without an account it never leaves your computer at all. Signed in, your last ten charts are kept for six months so you can pick one up again. You can delete them whenever you like.
Only to put a piece in the gallery. Converting a photograph and downloading its chart needs nothing at all.
JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF. A transparent PNG works too: the transparent parts are left unstitched, so you get the subject on bare fabric.
Between 8 and 15 suits most photographs. Fewer reads bolder and stitches much faster; more keeps fine detail but means more thread changes, and past about 20 the extra shades are usually neighbours you cannot tell apart on cloth.
The width in stitches decides both the detail and the finished size. A face needs about 80 stitches across before it looks like the person; a simple motif is happy at 40. Divide the stitch count by your fabric's count for the size: 80 stitches on 14-count aida is a little under 15 cm.
The number of stitches per inch. 14-count is the usual starting point: comfortable to see and to work. A higher count is finer cloth, a smaller finished piece and more squinting.
Photographs are duller than thread. Matched faithfully, a mid-saturation photo picks mid-saturation shades and the finished piece can read flat next to the picture it came from. Vivid lifts the colour without touching brightness, which is corrective rather than a filter.
Because it runs a real segmentation model over your photograph, in your browser, to find the subject. A few seconds the first time, while the model is fetched, and quicker after. It works best on a plain background: a cat on a patterned rug will not come out cleanly.
A PNG with your pattern drawn at 20 pixels a stitch, a counting grid with a heavier rule every ten stitches, and the thread list underneath: every DMC reference, its name, and how many stitches of it you need.
Yes. In the download panel, click any thread and you get that thread on its own, with the outline of the whole piece around it so you can see where those stitches go. It is the sheet to work from with one skein in your hand, and it is how you tell two near-identical shades apart.
Every one. The converter matches against 483 plain-cotton DMC shades, judged the way an eye judges colour rather than the way a computer adds numbers. Metallic, satin and Étoile ranges are deliberately excluded: they share their colour codes with plain cotton, and being sent out for shiny black thread when you wanted black is not helpful.
Yes. Give it your DMC references and it will match using nothing else.
Yes. Stitched from your own chart, there is nothing to ask. From another member's chart, that is allowed too, as long as you credit them. Do check you have the right to use the photograph itself, which is a separate question and not ours to answer. The details are on the “Using charts and photos” page.
In the gallery, which holds two lists. The charts are patterns made on this site, browsable by subject and free to take with their thread lists. The finished pieces are photographs of real work posted by the people who stitched it, including work stitched from patterns found elsewhere, because a finished piece is worth showing whatever it came from.
Yes, once somebody has stitched it. A chart that has been made carries a link to every finished piece that names it: the same grid on somebody else's fabric, in somebody else's threads and frame. It is the most honest preview there is, better than any screen, because thread has a texture a screen cannot show.
Yes. Every chart in the gallery can be downloaded free, with its full DMC thread list and stitch counts, with or without an account. That is what the gallery is for.
Photograph it, in the hoop is lovely, sign in, and add it to the finished pieces. If you stitched it from a chart on this site you can name that chart, and your piece then appears under it for everybody deciding whether to start the same one. If the pattern came from anywhere else, post it anyway: that gallery was never meant to be a catalogue of what this converter can make.
The gallery holds two lists. The charts are patterns made here, and any of them can be taken for free with its thread list. The finished pieces are photographs of real work, posted by the people who stitched it, from charts made here and from patterns found anywhere else. A chart somebody has already stitched carries a link to the pieces that came out of it: the same grid, on somebody else's fabric, in somebody else's frame. It is the most honest preview there is, and the best place to work out what a photograph becomes once it is in a hoop.