Create Cross Stitch Pattern From Photo
Margaret Sigars
Did you ever had a picture or photo in your hand and thought: it would be nice if I could transfer this into a cross stitch embroidery pattern.With a few clicks in your image editing programm you can easily pixelate images but you quickly come to your limit. For example when it comes tomap the colors in the image in order to find the corresponding embroidery threads. And after that telling the printer that you want him to print out a handy, well-recognizable pattern ...
Just upload your favorite picture, determine the number of stitches as well as the number of embroidery colors and let pixel stitch do the work for you.In no time the pattern in PDF format will be provided to you so you can easily download and print it. In the PDF you will find all the infos to get started with your project like informations to the different color numbers and the legend of the embroidery pattern.
Creating cross stitch patterns from your own pictures is very easy with Pic2Pat. In three simple steps you will transform a picture into a beautiful cross stitch chart. The chart can be downloaded to yourcomputer where you can print and store it. If you want to print the pattern again at a later date, there is no need to go to the website again, because the design is stored on locally on your computer.
Pic2Pat makes life very easy by calculating which colors embroidery floss are needed and how many skeins you need of each color. Therefore you can start immediately creating your artwork.
Select a picture file on your computer and press the Next button to upload the picture to the Pic2Pat server. By pressing the Browse button, you can browse through your pictures to find the correct file.
Pic2Pat can process almost all image formats. The maximum file size is 18 MB. Keep in mind that large images take some seconds to be sent to the Pic2Pat server. It may therefore take a few moments after pressing the Next button before the next step is shown where you can select the size of the artwork, and the number of stitches perinch.
Turn your photos into cross stitch patterns. Simply upload a photo, select your preferences: size, filter, stitch count and number of colors. A detailed color cross stitch chart, complete with thread color codes and quantities will be emailed to your inbox, as well as being available to download from your DMC account.
The charts are PDF files that can be printed on A4 paper at home. Click to see an example.
Stitch charts can be customized to stitch on 14, 16 or 18 count Aida or 28 or 32 count linen, in a range of sizes.
Sign up for needlecraft inspiration, free patterns and offers straight to your inbox. Code valid for 30 days on orders over $40. We promise not to spam or give your email away. View our privacy policy for more info.
The first thing to do here is to define a grid pattern. I used 5px squares, and I want every five lines to be heavier, so I made a new document with 25x25px, and drew four gray lines and one black in both planes. Remember to use a transparent background. Then define it as a pattern.
Now make a new layer above the original and fill it with your new grid pattern. Choose the Paint Bucket Fill Tool and select "Pattern" in the drop down, and use your new pattern. Then just click in the new empty layer to fill it with the pattern!
Next, you want to merge the grid layer and the original image layer.
Nice huh?
You could be satisfied here, but I am not. I once wanted to make a pattern out of a grayscale image using black, white and two shades of grey, but the greys were to hard to tell apart, so next I will explain how to replace colors with representing symbols. (also I have no color printer)
Here is a good place to make a copy of your result. You will need it to identify the colors after they are replaced!
The first thing to do now is to define a few patterns to replace the colors with. They should be 5x5px and use only the top left 4x4 pixels, if you made the grid pattern the same as mine.
Next, make a new layer and place it behind the original image.
Fill this layer with one of your patterns.
Now, using the magic wand, select the color you want to replace (without Anti-alias, and with Tolerance 0 and non-Contiguous).
Clear the contents of the selection (delete/backspace) to let the pattern shine through.
Now, repeat this with all the colors you need to replace and you are set!
If you want it to look better you could easily use bigger squares from start, and make a wider grid and symbols, but this is good enough for me.
That's all for now! Post your home made patterns in the comments so we can se what you do!
Check out my instagram Restitch where I cross-stitch pixel characters on second-hand tapestries.
Hello all. I am working on a project that I'm not sure if there's a better way of doing it and i'm hoping to get some advice. The client wants a photo-realistic cross stitch of an image. I pixellated the image to use as a pattern (attached - just need the woman processed, not the background), and created a stroke x with an emboss effect and shadows.
Now for the tedious part: I am placing the x on the pattern, recoloring the stroke to match the pattern color. One by one. At this point, it's probably easier for me to actually do an actual fabric cross stitch than the way I'm doing it. There's a lot of PSD actions out there to do the embroidery actions, but none work with AD/AP. I canceled my Adobe, so I don't have access to Photoshop. I looked for an embroidered cross stitch pattern that I can use as a clipping path, but couldn't find any. Overlaying a cross stitch raster pattern doesn't work either (and I can't find a cross stitch pattern large enough to overlay). At my wits end, although, putting the cross stitches on the pattern is pretty relaxing. Please help.
I'm thinking you're on the right path with the pixellation, although I think rather than recolouring the stitches individually you could try using the blending modes to achieve the same effect and just use a large grid of identical stitches that overlay the colours? You may need to experiment with this, and perhaps have two layers of cross stitch pattern - one for the stitch highlights using 'screen' mode, and one for the stitch shadows using 'multiply' mode. These can then be layered over the pixellated image which will supply the colour. You'd need to ensure the stiches were the same size as the pixellation effect, so that each stitch fits into a pixellated square exactly. To remove the colour area outside of the actual stitches then you could have a white surround for the stitch on the highlights layer. It would probably be a lot easier to make the stiches using Designer as you can utilise the smart duplicate feature to create the grid of stitches a lot faster, but it should be achievable using Photo alone.
Here's a couple of files to show the idea I'm getting at. There's a single cross stich file with the original cross stich in it (with layers etc.) which I quickly created in Photo using a couple of rounded rectangles and a background square. This would ideally be duplicated up into a grid before exporting as a sheet of stitches for both highlights and shadows. I've also attached a test file which shows a pixellated image with the stitches exported and placed into a grouped item with the layer modes applied. This allows them to be placed over the pixellated image and create a similar effect to what you had but without having to recolour anything (I've imported a single stitch image and duplicated it here, but an entire sheet could be exported so that this could happen in one step). Obviously, I've done this super quick as a demo, and you'd need to carefully match the sizes better than I have here, but it should give you the idea.
Something else I've thought of that goes with the previous idea ... you could use a bitmap fill (using the gradient tool then selecting bitmap in the context bar dropdown) on a couple of rectangles (one for highlights, one for shadows) to create a grid of stitches without duplicating them all separately.
Thank you very much, Dazzler. Working with a combination of gridwork and a lot of clean up and filters I was able to create this. Thanks for your help. I ended up using a single cross stitch that I liked, extracted the highlights/shadows and then using it to fill in a canvas of cross stitches. Then traced edges then deleting the background, screen/multiply, and adding emboss/shadow effects on a fabric texture. Liked it very much. Thanks for saving me from having to deal with all of that fiddling.
I can remember this being asked on this forum before, but I can't find that thread now. There are lots of references to using Photoshop to create cross stitch and lots of videos, but I wouldn't like to judge how effective they are.
Hello dear readers! Today I will show you how to use Photoshop to make images that are easy to convert into cross stitch charts (using a program like Macstitch or KG-Chart). This is how I start with pretty much every pattern I make.
Pretty much anything that you can do in Photoshop you can save as a PNG and turn into a cross stitch chart. Tutorials in how to use Photoshop are beyond the scope of this blog (and also very numerous on the internet), but I recommend checking some out if you want to make more complicated designs.
The good people at www.pic2pat.com have created a super useful free online app to do just that. The lovely image of a pair of parrots above is a good example. This app is best viewed on a computer web browser because some important information is not visible on a mobile phone.
To convert an image to a cross-stitch pattern, follow these steps:
Note on selecting size
For beginners, we recommend choosing a size no larger than 12 x 12 inches. To put things in context, the size of an A4 sheet of paper is about 12 x 8 inches. It is up to you to choose any size you want. But remember the larger the size, the longer it will take to complete the work, and the more thread you will need.