Make a coloring page from a photo

Pick a photo that works

The page can only draw what is in the photo, so the photo decides most of the result. The best ones have one clear subject that fills a good part of the frame: a pet, a house, a car, a flower, a face. A plain or softly blurred background helps more than almost anything else. If the background is cluttered, crop close to the subject before the page is drawn.

• One subject, large. A small figure in a wide scene turns into a few lines among many. Press Crop above the picture and draw a box round the part you want, or crop the photo before you drop it.
• Contrast between subject and background. The tool will not invent an outline where the photo has none, so a black cat on a dark sofa comes out with a weak outline.
• Not too much texture. Fur, grass, snow, fabric and wood grain contain real edges, and every one of them can become a line.
• Not too small. A photo from a phone or camera is plenty. If a picture is very small, the result box says so.

What the default style does well, and where it struggles

The lean version leaves the style on automatic. For each photo it looks at the picture and picks how to draw it. A photo is drawn by a line-drawing model that works the way an illustrator would: faces, small parts and lettering in clean, even lines, with the shading left out. A drawing or outlined clipart keeps its own lines, and a logo or lettering on a flat colour is outlined exactly as it is.

That works well for a portrait, a pet's face, a building, a car, a toy or any object on a plain background. It struggles with the cases above: fur and grass turn scratchy, a cluttered room stays cluttered, and a very dark photo is brightened before it is drawn. The first photo takes a little longer than the next, because your browser downloads the drawing model once and keeps it.

Printing on Letter or A4

Choose Letter or A4 under Printable page. The PDF is the exact size of the sheet, with the drawing centred inside a half-inch margin, so print it at 100 percent, which some printers call "actual size". If you scale it to fit, the page shrinks and the margin changes. A wide photo gets a landscape sheet automatically, and the Printed page view above the picture shows the sheet before you print.

The same page is also a PNG at 300 dpi, which is the easy choice for a photo printing service or a document. Two more downloads are lines only: an SVG, and a PNG of the line art without the sheet around it. All four are free and carry no watermark.

When the page is not what you hoped for

This page is lean on purpose, and a lean page cannot fix every photo. If the result is too busy or too faint, try a photo with a clearer subject first. If you want to change the lines yourself, the full Coloring page maker has Simple, Medium and Detailed, a detail slider, Fine pencil and Bold outline line styles, an eraser and a pen, and it takes several photos, one at a time (a zip of many pages is part of Pro), and an optional Cloud AI redraw for photos that are hard to trace. To put many pictures in one printable PDF, there is the coloring book maker, free for up to 12 pictures.

Questions