Guides / Making your chart
The converter can only work with the picture you give it. A few edits on your phone beforehand change the result more than any setting afterwards.
Five minutes of editing before converting beat every setting afterwards. You need no special software: the Photos app on your phone or computer does everything below. The aim is always the same, to give the converter a picture where the subject is large, clear and well separated from what surrounds it.
Use the photo as it came off the camera, not the copy sent through a messaging app, nor a screenshot. Those copies are heavily compressed, and compression creates little blocks of colour that the chart faithfully reproduces, as stitches in unexpected colours.
It does not need to be huge: a chart is at most 200 stitches wide, and a 1,000-pixel picture has five times what it needs. Avoid strong filters and photos “enhanced” by the phone, though: they shift the colours, and the chart will pick threads that are not really in your subject.
This is the edit that matters most. Every stitch spent on the background is one less for the subject: on an 80-stitch chart, a dog that fills half the picture has only 40 stitches to exist in.
A tilted horizon, a crooked shelf or a frame photographed at an angle shows much more in stitches than in a photo: straight lines become uneven staircases. The editor's “Straighten” tool corrects a few degrees. The converter itself only turns a picture by a quarter turn, for a phone photo lying on its side.
A dark photo makes a muddy chart: all the shadows land on the same very dark threads, 310 and 3371, and the modelling disappears. Raise the brightness a little, or better, the shadows alone, until you can clearly see detail in the dark areas.
Then add a little contrast if the subject melts into the background. Stop before the whites turn into one patch: a blown highlight on fur becomes a flat area of B5200. Leave the saturation alone; the converter's “Colour brightness” setting does that better, with real threads.
A busy background is the first cause of disappointing charts: leaves, bookshelves, a crowded street. The converter spends its colours there instead of keeping them for the subject, and scatters single stitches through it.
Three fixes, from the simplest to the most radical. Crop again, if the background only fills the edges. Blur the background with portrait mode or the editor's blur tool, so it melts into two or three calm colours. Or cut the subject out, either with your phone's tool or with the converter's “Remove the background” option, which leaves bare fabric around the subject.
A lead, a power line, a stray hand, a mark on the wall: the phone's retouch tool removes them in one stroke. On the chart they would have become a line of stitches to fix one by one in the pattern maker.
Tip. Do keep the small white glint in an animal's eye, though. It is often a single stitch of White or B5200, and it is what brings the eye to life. If the conversion lost it, add it back by hand.
When you hesitate between two crops or two brightness levels, run both through the converter at the same width and the same number of threads, and compare. It takes a minute, and the difference is often clear.
To choose the photo in the first place, see the guide on which photo to choose. Next, the guide to turning a photo into a chart goes through every setting, and the one on choosing the size of a chart helps you settle the width.