How to Turn a Photo Into a Cross Stitch Pattern

Turning a photograph into a cross stitch chart looks like it should be automatic. Upload, wait, stitch. In practice the software makes a handful of decisions on your behalf, and if you leave them all on their defaults you often end up with a chart that is technically correct and thoroughly miserable to work. A little thought at the start saves a great deal of unpicking later.

Start with the right photo

A chart has far less to work with than a photograph. A 200 by 250 stitch design has 50,000 squares and perhaps thirty colours. Your phone photo has millions of pixels and millions of colours. Everything you love about the picture has to survive that reduction.

What survives well:

• A clear subject that fills the frame. A dog's head, one flower, a single building.
• Good light with real contrast. If the subject and background are similar in tone, they will merge into one another once the palette shrinks.
• Simple shapes. Strong outlines read beautifully in stitches.

What tends not to survive:

• Wide landscapes with lots of small detail
• Group photographs, where every face is only a few stitches across
• Anything shot in dim light or heavily zoomed

If you can, crop tightly before you convert. It is the cheapest improvement available.

Remove the background first

This is the step most people skip, and it makes more difference than any other setting.

Your pattern has a colour budget. Every shade in the palette is one you have to buy, thread and manage. If half the image is an out-of-focus hedge, a good chunk of that budget goes on greens and browns nobody will ever look at. Strip the background out first and the whole palette lands on the subject, where the detail actually matters.

You can then leave the background blank, which is a common and very effective look, or replace it with a single flat colour. Either way the finished piece is cleaner and considerably faster to stitch. HobbyTub can remove a background in one click before converting, in the pattern maker.

Decide the size before the colours

Size and detail are the same decision wearing two hats. More stitches means more room for detail, and also more hours.

Work backwards from the finished piece. Decide how big you want it on the wall, then use your fabric count to convert that into stitches. On 14 count aida you get 14 stitches to the inch, so a 10 inch wide design is 140 stitches wide. Our guide to fabric count covers this properly, and if you want to be precise about the fabric you need to buy, work through how much aida you need.

Only once you know the stitch count does the colour count make sense. A tiny design with sixty colours is unstitchable. A large one with eight can look flat.

Keep the colour count honest

Left alone, most converters will happily hand you sixty or seventy shades. It looks impressive on screen. It is dreadful in the hand.

Every extra colour means another skein to buy, another bobbin to keep track of, and more single stitches scattered across the chart. Those scattered singles are called confetti, and they are the main reason people abandon photo patterns. If you have not met the problem yet, confetti and how to tame it is worth reading before you start rather than after.

As a rough starting point, try twenty to thirty colours for a medium design and look at the preview. Reduce until it starts to lose something you care about, then go back one step.

Look at the chart, not just the preview

The preview shows you what the finished piece looks like. The chart shows you what stitching it will feel like. They are different questions.

Before you commit, look at the actual grid. Are there large areas of solid colour to build rhythm on? Or is it a fine speckle of alternating shades? A chart with breathing room in it is a chart you will finish.

Tidy it up afterwards

A converted pattern is a starting point, not a finished design. Opening it in a pattern editor lets you do the things software cannot judge for you: removing stray single stitches, cleaning up an edge that went ragged, and adding backstitch outlines to sharpen features. A little backstitch around eyes and edges does more for a photo pattern than another ten colours ever will.

Ready to try one?

Pick a photograph with a clear subject and good light, crop it close, and convert it at a modest colour count. Then look at the chart properly before you buy a single skein.

You can turn a photo into a pattern in HobbyTub, edit it, and track every stitch as you work it. If you would rather start from something already designed, browse the pattern library instead.