Photo2PatternFree custom diamond painting chart
Custom diamond painting, counted stone by stone
Free and with no account: drop a photograph, say how wide the canvas is and which stone you are buying, and the page returns the grid, the exact number of drills behind every DMC code, the packets that implies and the finished size in both 2.5 mm squares and 2.8 mm rounds. It charts up to 60,000 stones and up to 70 codes, which covers everything from a 10 cm coaster to a 50 x 70 cm canvas. The picture is opened by JavaScript in this tab and goes no further.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 2.5 mm and 2.8 mm
- Up to 60,000 drills
- Exact count per DMC code
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in a photo sitting on your clipboard — no need to click the field first.
Centimeters across, 10 to 70; the height comes from your picture. Divided by the 2.5 mm pitch that is 160 stones across. The sizes suppliers print most are 30, 40 and 50 cm wide.
Squares butt against each other with nothing showing between, which is why lettering and hard edges are worked in this shape.
Each one is another labeled bag on the invoice, so this is the control that moves the price. The ceiling is 70 because the mark set holds 70 glyphs and a chart past that starts numbering its cells instead.
Every cell takes its own nearest color. Flat areas stay flat and the color count stays low — the right choice for anything worked by hand.
Suppliers weigh drills out rather than counting them, and a 10 g sachet of 2.8 mm rounds runs near 200 stones at roughly 0.05 g each. Squares are lighter, so the same sachet holds more. Put your own supplier’s figure here.
Reported rates run from about 400 an hour picking one stone at a time and sorting as you go, to past 1,200 on a flat area with a multi-placer. 700 sits in the middle of that and is worth replacing with your own once you have timed a row.
How to chart a photograph as drills
Canvas and drill size fix how much work the piece is before a single color has been chosen.
Type the canvas you are buying, not a number of cells
Diamond painting is sold by the canvas — 30 x 40, 40 x 50, 50 x 70 cm — so the width in centimeters is the input and the grid falls out of it. Forty centimeters divided by a 2.5 mm square is 160 stones across; the same forty centimeters in 2.8 mm rounds is 142. Height follows your file's own proportions, which is why cropping to the canvas shape before you arrive is worth more than any control on this page.
Choose the stone before you look at the picture
Square and round are not two finishes of one chart, they are two different grids. A square canvas packs 12% more stones into the same width, so it holds finer detail and its edges land hard against each other; a round canvas leaves 21.5% of its printed surface showing between the discs, which softens every boundary and is forgiving on a first piece. Switch the selector and watch the drill total move — that number is the work, and it changes before a single color has been chosen.
Walk the color budget down until the invoice stops moving
Start at 36 and drag it toward 20, watching the bag count rather than the preview. Each color you remove is a labeled sachet a supplier no longer has to fill and a tray compartment you no longer have to keep straight, and the stones it held are re-placed in the nearest shade that survived. Below about 15 a photographic face starts to posterize into flat bands; between 20 and 40 is where most commercial portrait kits actually sit.
Technical specifications
| What you set | Canvas width in centimeters, 10 to 70, starting at 40 because 40 x 50 cm is the size most kits are sold in. Rows come from the picture's own proportions; there is no separate height control to get wrong |
|---|---|
| Stone pitch | 2.5 mm square or 2.8 mm round, the two sizes the trade prints canvases for. A round stone covers 78.5% of its cell, which is the area of a circle inscribed in a square, so the printed canvas shows in the gaps |
| Shades matched against | The full DMC solid range, snapped in Oklab rather than by RGB distance — on skin tones an RGB match reaches for grays where Oklab reaches for the tans and pinks that read as skin |
| Colors on the invoice | 2 to 70, 36 to begin with. The ceiling is 70 because the chart has 70 distinct printable marks and a cell past that would carry a number instead of a symbol |
| Largest piece charted | 60,000 drills. A 50 x 70 cm canvas in squares is 56,000 and fits; a 60 x 80 cm one is 76,800 and is refused with the canvas width that would fit offered as a button |
| Exact, and not exact | Per-code drill counts and the total are tallies of cells and are exact. Packets and hours divide those tallies by two editable assumptions — 200 stones a sachet and 700 placed an hour — and are labeled as estimates wherever they appear |
| Edge handling | The final part-cell is dropped rather than half-drilled, so a 40 cm canvas at 2.8 mm finishes 2.4 mm narrow and the note under the chart says by how much |
| The three files you keep | A chart PNG held under 4,000,000 pixels so an iPhone returns an image rather than a blank one, the drill list as CSV, and print sheets of 38 x 55 stones with two stones repeated at each join |
Frequently asked questions
Will this print the adhesive canvas for me?
No — nothing here produces a printed canvas, and that is the honest limit of the page. A diamond painting canvas is a sheet of adhesive-coated fabric with the symbol grid printed under the glue and a release film over it, which is factory work. What this page gives you is the sheet you check before you order one: how many stones the piece holds, which DMC codes and how many of each, what it measures finished in both stone sizes, and whether the photograph survives being cut into stones at all. Take the drill list to a custom-kit supplier, or use it to drill a blank adhesive canvas yourself from the printed chart.
Why is the same photograph a different size in round and in square?
Because the stone sets the pitch and the two stones are different sizes: 2.5 mm for a square, 2.8 mm for a round. The grid is decided by the canvas width you asked for, so the two shapes give two different grids from the start — 40 cm holds 160 square columns or 142 round ones. If you instead keep the grid fixed and swap the stone, the finished piece grows by exactly 2.8 / 2.5, which is 12% in each direction and 25% in area. That is why a frame bought against one figure will not take the other, and why both figures are printed side by side rather than one being chosen for you.
How many colors should I ask for?
Twenty to forty for a photograph, and closer to twenty than forty for a first one. Each code is a separate sachet to be filled, labeled, shipped and kept apart on the tray, so the count is the single biggest lever on both the price and the sorting time. Past about forty the shades being added are neighbors of ones already on the list — the chart page for this range measures 160 pairs across the whole DMC set that sit closer together than a very close match — so you are paying for bags you will pour into the wrong compartment. Graphic subjects with flat areas are happy at eight to twelve.
Will a face still look like that person at 40 cm?
Only if the head fills a decent part of the frame, and the arithmetic tells you before you order. At 2.5 mm a stone, a head that occupies a third of a 160-column canvas is about 53 stones across, which gives an eye roughly 6 stones wide and an iris 2 — enough to read as an eye from a meter away and not enough to carry a catchlight. The same head in a group photo at 20 stones across has one stone for an eye and will come back as a smudge no color budget can rescue. Crop tight before you upload; on this material that decision is worth more than every other control combined.
Why are the drill counts exact but the packets a guess?
Because a stone is a countable object and a sachet is a weight. The Drills column is a tally of grid cells carrying that code, so it is exact and it is what a custom-kit supplier fills against. Packets are not: suppliers weigh drills out rather than counting them, and a 10 g sachet holds roughly 200 round stones at about 0.05 g each while the lighter squares run more to the same weight. That is why the packet size is an editable field with its assumption printed under the table, and why the note under it tells you to buy the extra packet rather than trusting the division.
Is there ever a reason to dither a drill chart?
Almost never on this material, and the page defaults it off for a reason. Error diffusion buys smoother gradients by scattering isolated stones of a neighboring shade through flat areas, which on a screen reads as depth. On a canvas it reads as a mistake, because each of those stray stones is a separate trip to a different tray compartment and, if the shade appears nowhere else, a whole packet bought for a dozen placements. Ordered dithering is the one exception worth trying: its crosshatch is regular, so it looks deliberate at arm's length rather than dirty.
My picture has a transparent background. What happens to it?
Any cell that comes out more than half transparent is left bare and carries no code, which is exactly how a partial-drill kit is laid out — the subject is stoned and the background stays printed canvas. Those cells are excluded from the drill total, from every per-code count and from the packet arithmetic, and the note under the chart says how many there were. If you want full coverage instead, flatten the picture onto a background color in whatever produced the PNG before you drop it here, because this page will not invent a color for a cell that has none.
About drills, DMC numbers and what a custom canvas really costs
A diamond painting is a mosaic with a fixed pitch, and that pitch is the whole design problem. Every stone is a flat-backed resin cabochon with a faceted top, glued to an adhesive canvas on a printed grid, and it comes in two sizes: a 2.5 mm square that butts against its neighbors with nothing showing between, or a 2.8 mm round that sits as a disc in a square cell and covers 78.5% of it. Nothing about the picture can be finer than that cell. A 40 cm canvas is 160 squares across and no more, which means the operation is arithmetically the same thing as pixelating an image — except that here the block size is set by a manufacturer in Zhejiang rather than by you, and each block costs money. Understanding that one number, and cropping so the subject actually spans enough of it, does more for a finished piece than any amount of tuning afterwards.
The colors are labeled with DMC numbers, which is a convention rather than a fact about the material. DMC makes stranded cotton for embroidery, not resin; the drill trade adopted its catalog because it was the numbering that already existed for a fine ladder of shades, so a bag stamped 3865 means a factory matched its resin to that floss shade. That is two approximations in a row — the resin against the cotton, and then any screen against the resin — and it is why the swatches here are for shortlisting rather than deciding. The full range, searchable and printable, is on the drill color chart, which also names the pairs of codes nobody can tell apart once the bags are open; if you are working with the thread itself rather than stones, the DMC chart is the page for that.
The thing most generators get wrong is treating the color count as a quality slider. On a screen more shades is strictly better, so a tool that optimizes for the preview will happily return ninety codes. On a canvas ninety codes is ninety sachets to buy, label, open and keep from mixing, several of them holding under fifty stones — and once two codes are close enough that you cannot separate them on the tray, the extra one is not detail, it is an afternoon of sorting. So the budget here is expressed as bags rather than as quality, and anything cut is re-placed in the nearest surviving shade rather than left as a hole. Every cell also carries a printed mark as well as a color, because roughly one person in twelve cannot separate two adjacent greens by eye and no grayscale printer can separate any of them; a picture built entirely out of marks, with the color thrown away, is what the ASCII art generator does. If the counting appeals more than the gluing, the same arithmetic over a pegboard is the Perler bead page.
Product and company names shown here are the trademarks of their respective owners. Photo2Pattern is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them.
Your photograph never leaves this tab
Your picture is opened by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading this in. It is never uploaded, never sent to a server and never stored anywhere — there is no upload step to undo, because there is no upload. Close the tab and nothing of it remains.
The DMC shade table ships inside this page’s JavaScript, so changing the canvas width or the color budget makes no network request either — the matching runs against a local array, and the only things that ever leave are the PNG and the CSV you save yourself.