Photo to crochet chart

Turn a photo into a colour chart you can crochet from, and have it come out the shape of the photo rather than stretched.

Contents (8)

Example 20 sts wide Both worked in double crochet 12 sts × 7 rows / 10 cm

What the converter does

A colour chart is a grid where every square is one stitch in one colour. The converter makes that grid from a photo: it shrinks the photo to the number of stitches you ask for, then reduces its thousands of colours to the few yarns you will work with, putting each stitch in the nearest one.

That gets you most of the way. A photo has gradients and fine detail that a few colours of yarn cannot hold, so the last stretch is always done by hand, and the better the photo you start with, the shorter that stretch is.

The chart can be worked in tapestry crochet, intarsia, corner to corner or any stitch you like. The figure above is why the stitch matters before you convert, which is covered further down.

Choosing a photo

Most of the result is decided here. The photos that convert well have the same few things in common.

Subject: One clear subject that fills the frame. Crop tightly before you upload: every stitch spent on background is one not spent on the subject.
Background: Plain, and a different colour from the subject. A busy background takes yarn colours the subject needs.
Light: Even and flat. A strong shadow becomes a colour of its own, and a bright highlight becomes a hole in the middle of a face.
Detail: Anything smaller than a stitch disappears. At 60 stitches across a portrait, an eye is two or three stitches wide. Bold shapes survive; whiskers and text do not.

Drawings, logos and cartoons, with flat colours and hard edges, convert more cleanly than any photo. If you have a choice, start with one of those.

Step by step

Crop the photo close around the one thing you want charted, and save it as a PNG, JPEG or WEBP under 3 MB.
Open the chart maker's photo converter and drop the photo in.
Set the width: how many stitches across the finished chart will be.
Set how many yarn colours it may use. Four to six is a good first try.
Under Worked in, choose the stitch you will crochet it in, or type your own gauge.
Choose Generate preview and compare the result with your photo. Change one setting at a time and generate again until it reads.
Swap each colour for the yarn you will actually use, name the chart, and open it in the editor to tidy it by hand.

The converter is in the chart maker. It runs in your browser, so the photo is not uploaded anywhere, and it needs no account.

How wide to make it

The width is in stitches, and it decides two things at once: how big the piece is and how much detail it can hold. The converter starts at 100.

To work out the size, divide by your gauge. At 14 single crochet to 10 cm, 100 stitches is about 71 cm across, a lap blanket; 40 stitches is about 29 cm, a cushion front. Once you have chosen a stitch, the converter shows what the chart will measure before you generate it.

More stitches means more detail, and more stitches to work. If a face is unrecognisable at 50, it may read at 80; if it reads at 80, try 70 and see whether it still does.

How many colours

Every colour is another ball of yarn to carry or another bobbin to hang, and every change between them is a join. Fewer colours make a chart that is quicker to work and easier to read; more keep shading that would otherwise go flat.

Start at four to six and generate. If two parts of the subject have merged into one colour, go up by one; if there are colours you can barely tell apart, go down by one. The converter allows anything from 2 to 100, but every colour past eight or so is mostly more ends to weave in.

Each colour it picks is listed under Yarn colours. Change any of them to the shade you will buy, from a shelf of common yarn colours or your own; the chart is recoloured in place without converting again.

The stitch you work it in

A chart is drawn in squares, and crochet stitches are not square. A double crochet is nearly twice as tall as it is wide. Worked from a chart drawn on squares, every row comes out taller than it was drawn, and the picture stretches: in the figure at the top, a circle charted on squares and worked in double crochet comes out an oval 29 cm tall and 17 cm wide.

Tell the converter the stitch under Worked in, before you generate, and it takes fewer rows to make up for the taller stitch, so the same circle is charted in 12 rows instead of 20 and comes out round. The stitches it offers, with the gauge each assumes:

Single crochet: 14 sts × 16 rows / 10 cm
Half double: 13 sts × 11 rows / 10 cm
Double crochet: 12 sts × 7 rows / 10 cm

Those are typical for a DK yarn, a starting point rather than your tension. If you have worked a gauge swatch, choose Your own and type in what you counted. Square grid keeps the chart as drawn, which is right for corner to corner, where each square of the chart is a square tile.

Tidying stray stitches

Shrinking a photo to a few colours leaves strays: a single stitch of one colour alone in a field of another. On screen it is a speck. In yarn it is a join and two ends to weave in, for something nobody will see in the finished piece.

Example 16 × 12 6 strays Tidy 2

Tidy stray stitches takes any patch smaller than the number you give it into the colour around it. The default, 2, removes only stitches that sit completely alone. Raise it, up to 6, for a busy photo; set it to 1 to leave the conversion untouched. A stitch counts as alone if none of the four stitches beside, above or below it shares its colour; touching at a corner does not count.

Finishing it in the editor

Name the chart and choose Open in the editor. What the converter handed you is now an ordinary chart, and everything about it can be changed.

Paint: Fix what the conversion got wrong a stitch at a time: an eye that merged into a brow, an edge that went ragged.
Key: Name each colour after the yarn it is, so the chart still makes sense in a month or to somebody else.
Yarn: An estimate of how much of each colour the chart takes, from your gauge and your yarn.
Rows: Which way you work: rows running across, up, diagonally for corner to corner, or round, from whichever corner you start.
Count: Each row written out as runs of colour, to read from your phone as you work, aloud if you like.

Print it or download it as an image when it is done. Everything up to here is free and needs no account; keeping charts in an account to come back to is part of Premium.