How to turn a photo into a cross stitch pattern

Pick a photo that will survive the shrink

A converter can only work with what the photo gives it, and at stitch scale a photo loses most of its detail. A chart 100 stitches wide has 100 squares of color across the whole picture. Your phone photo has thousands of pixels across, so resolution is rarely the problem. The problem is whether the parts you care about are big enough to still read once they're reduced to a few dozen squares.

Photos that chart well usually have one clear subject that fills most of the frame. A dog lying on a plain rug converts far better than the same dog as a small figure in a busy park. Good, even light helps too. Dim indoor photos tend to come out as a narrow band of muddy browns, while a photo taken by a window has real lights and darks for the colors to follow.

If the photo you love is dark, brighten it in your phone's photo editor before converting. The converter already stretches contrast and sharpens fine detail in its default mode, but it can't recover a face that's mostly shadow.

Look at the background before you start. Sky, a plain wall or a soft blur turns into a handful of colors you can simplify or leave unstitched. Leaves, brickwork and patterned wallpaper turn into hundreds of scattered stitches that compete with your subject.

Crop before you convert

Cropping is the cheapest way to get more stitches onto the subject. If a face takes up a third of the photo, two thirds of your stitching goes to something else.

Crop to the shape you plan to display, too. If the finished piece is going into an 8 by 10 inch frame, crop the photo to that 4:5 shape now rather than discovering later that the design is too wide. For a hoop, a square crop with the subject centered is easiest to work with.

Decide the size in stitches first

A chart is measured in stitches, not inches. How big it stitches up depends on the fabric count, which is the number of stitches per inch. Divide the stitches by the count and you have the finished size.

Evenweave and linen are usually stitched over two threads, so 28-count evenweave gives 14 stitches per inch, the same as 14-count Aida. The Aida count converter does this math for every common count and adds fabric for the margin.

I'd pick the stitch count for the detail you want and then choose the fabric to land on a sensible size, not the other way around. A logo or a bold silhouette can look clean at 50 to 80 stitches wide. A pet portrait needs more. For a head-and-shoulders portrait of a person, 150 stitches across is a reasonable place to start, because eyes and the corners of a mouth need several stitches each to read as features. Below that, faces start to look like rough sketches of themselves.

More stitches is more work, though. A 150 by 150 design stitched edge to edge is 22,500 crosses. If you're unsure, see how long a cross stitch takes before committing.

Choose how many colors

Each color you allow means one more skein to buy and one more symbol to tell apart on the chart. More colors give smoother shading in skin, fur and sky. They also produce more single scattered stitches, and those are the slowest stitches in a photo pattern.

No setting is right for every photo. Simple graphics often look best with only the colors you can count by eye in the original. Photos usually need more, and portraits more again because skin moves through many close shades. Try the same photo at two or three settings and compare them at the size you'll actually stitch. The guide to choosing a color count goes into this in more detail.

Watch for confetti

Stitchers call single, isolated stitches "confetti": one stitch of a color with no neighbor in the same color. Photos are full of tiny variations in shading and noise, and a converter faithfully turns many of them into lone stitches. Raise the color count and you get more of them.

Each confetti stitch needs its own start and finish, or a thread carried across the back. Carrying is only safe where later stitches will cover the strand, since a carried thread behind bare fabric can show through. That's why a confetti-heavy chart can take much longer than its stitch count suggests.

Some confetti is worth keeping. A single light stitch in an eye is what makes it look wet and alive. A scatter of odd stitches across a flat wall is just noise.

Decide what to do with the background

You have three realistic options:

1. Leave it unstitched. Choose a fabric color close to the photo's background and let the fabric do the work. This saves the most time.
2. Replace it with one flat color, or a gentle two-color fade.
3. Keep the photo background as converted. This gives the most realistic result and by far the most stitches and confetti.

If you go with the first option, clear the background from the chart after converting and check the edges of the subject. Converters often leave a ring of in-between colors where the subject met the background, and that ring looks odd against bare fabric.

Clean it up by hand

Treat the converted chart as a first draft. These are the fixes I'd make on almost every photo pattern:

• Check the eyes first. Pupils should be a solid dark, with one deliberate highlight stitch. Conversions often blur both.
• Walls, clothing and sky usually want to be flat or gently shaded, so recolor any speckles there to match their neighbors.
• If a color covers only a few dozen stitches and sits right next to a very similar shade, merge the two. You save a skein and a symbol.
• A single-strand outline around the subject can sharpen a soft conversion. The page on backstitch outlines covers the stitch.
• Skin often picks up odd colors from indoor lighting, so look for grays or greens that crept into a face. Swap them for a nearby warm shade unless they're genuinely shadow.
• Whiskers, lettering and other fine lines rarely survive the grid. Put lines back with backstitch, and dots such as eye glints with French knots.

Work in blocks of 10 by 10 squares, the same blocks printed charts rule with heavier lines, and you'll catch more than if you scan the whole thing at once.

Then step back. Shrink the preview until it's roughly the size the piece will be when stitched, or look at it from across the room. Speckles that bothered you at full zoom often disappear at that distance, while a muddy patch where two similar colors meet becomes obvious. Fix what you can see from a normal viewing distance and leave the rest.

Doing it in Craft Studio

The photo to pattern converter is free and needs no account. It runs in your browser, so the photo isn't uploaded. You set the width with a slider and the most colors you want with another, and there's a Crisp edges option for logos and drawings. Every color is matched to the nearest DMC floss, and the list under the preview shows how many stitches use each one. If two photo colors land on the same floss they're merged, so you may get a few fewer colors than you asked for.

For the hand cleanup, open the chart in the Craft Studio editor with a free account. It has backstitch, French knots, half-square and quarter-square partial stitches, and layers, so outlines can sit on their own layer above the stitches. The Check panel flags isolated single stitches, unused colors and empty rows or columns at the edges. When you're done, you can export a printable PDF with symbols and a floss key.