Upload a photograph or a drawing and get a counted chart with symbols, a thread list and printable sheets. The work happens in your browser — the picture is never uploaded.
Choose a picture and it turns into a chart here. Nothing is uploaded — the work happens in this browser.
The picture is first reduced to a grid: every square of the chart averages the block of pixels that falls inside it, rather than sampling a single pixel, so a detail that sits between two squares fades instead of vanishing. The grid is then reduced to the number of colours you asked for, and each square takes the closest one.
Closeness is measured in OKLab rather than in RGB. Two colours that differ by the same amount in RGB can look identical in one part of the spectrum and obviously different in another; OKLab is built so that equal distances look equally far apart. In practice it is the difference between a face keeping its shading and a face turning into three flat patches.
Symbols are handed out from the darkest colour to the lightest, heaviest mark first. That way a chart printed in black and white still reads as a picture — the dark areas look dark on the page.
The picture is read by your own browser and the chart is built there too. It is never uploaded, which is why there is no waiting and no queue — and why a photograph of your family stays a photograph of your family. Large pictures are scaled down before the work starts, because a chart of a hundred stitches does not need forty megapixels to be built from.
The palette comes out of your picture, not out of a manufacturer's shade card, and the legend gives each colour as a hex value. There is no built-in table of DMC, Anchor or Madeira numbers, and that is deliberate: those numbering systems are somebody's property, and we would rather ship without them than ship a table we cannot account for.
Instead the legend has a column you fill in yourself. Hold your shade card against the screen, type the number you actually own next to each colour, and it prints with the chart. Those numbers stay in this browser — they are never sent anywhere, and they follow the colour rather than its position in the list, so changing how many colours the chart uses does not shuffle them onto the wrong thread.
The chart is split into sheets of fifty stitches each way, with every tenth line drawn heavier so you can count in tens the way printed patterns do. Each sheet says which stitches it covers, and the thread list prints on the last page. Use your browser's print dialogue — there is no file to download and nothing to install.