Free Fuse Bead Pattern Maker

What happens to your picture

The image is divided into a grid with as many columns as the width you set. Each cell averages the pixels underneath it, and that average is compared against every color in the selected palette using CIELAB Delta E — a color distance that follows human perception far more closely than comparing raw RGB numbers. The nearest palette color wins the cell.

If you set Maximum colors, that limit is applied only after the normal match is complete. The most-used colors are kept, and every rarer color is re-matched to its nearest kept color with the same CIELAB distance. The grid size, transparency, and bead total do not change.

Transparent areas stay empty. Anything with less than half opacity is treated as background, which is why PNGs with a cut-out subject give the cleanest results.

All of this runs in your browser on your own device. The picture is never uploaded, there is no account, and closing the tab is enough to remove it.

Which images convert well

A bead pattern is a low-resolution mosaic with a fixed palette. Images survive that reduction when their meaning lives in large shapes and clear color contrast rather than in fine texture.

• Flat illustrations and logosfew colors, hard edges, and no gradients — these convert almost one to one.
• Cartoon and chibi-style characterslarge eyes and thick outlines stay readable even on a small grid.
• Pets and portraits with a plain backgroundwork well from about 58 beads wide, provided the subject fills the frame.
• Cut-out PNGs with transparencygive you a shaped piece instead of a rectangle, and save a lot of background beads.
• High-contrast graphics and pixel artthe closer the source already is to a grid, the more faithful the result.

Which images disappoint

These are worth knowing before you buy beads, because the preview usually looks acceptable on screen at small sizes and only fails once it is a physical object.

• Group photos and wide sceneryeach face ends up a handful of beads. Crop to a single subject first.
• Dark or backlit photographsshadow detail collapses into two or three near-black codes and the shape disappears.
• Soft gradients and airbrushed arta fixed palette turns a smooth sky into visible banding.
• Thin text and hairlinesanything under two beads wide will not survive; letters need roughly five beads of height to stay legible.
• Screenshots with compression artifactsJPEG noise around edges becomes stray single beads that you then have to clean up by hand.

Choosing the width

Width is the only size control; height follows your image proportions. Standard pegboards are 29 × 29 pegs, so the tool reports how many boards your pattern spans and the PDF splits along those lines.

Bead count grows with the square of the width. Doubling from 58 to 116 beads does not double the work — it quadruples it, from roughly 3,400 beads to about 13,500.

Clean blocks or smooth transitions

Clean blocks assign each cell its single nearest color. Areas stay flat, which is what makes a pattern comfortable to place: you can count a run of eleven identical beads instead of reading eleven separate codes.

Smooth transitions apply Floyd–Steinberg dithering. The rounding error from each cell is pushed into its neighbours, so a gradient is imitated by alternating two colors. It reproduces photographs more faithfully from a distance, but it scatters isolated beads, raises the number of colors you have to buy, and makes every row slower to place.

The practical rule: illustrations and anything with flat color should stay on clean blocks. Try smooth transitions on photographs at 87 beads and wider, where there is enough room for the pattern to average out visually.

Common problems and how to fix them

Almost every disappointing result comes from one of these four causes, and all four are fixed in the source image rather than in the pattern.

• Dark areas merged into one colorthe palette has far fewer dark tones than light ones, so shadows collapse. Raise the brightness and lower the contrast of the source image before uploading, or replace a black background with transparency.
• Detail disappearedthe feature was smaller than one bead. Crop tighter so the important part fills more of the frame, or increase the width. Cropping is almost always the better trade.
• Too many colors to buyphotographs routinely produce sixty or more codes, many of them used for a handful of beads. Set Maximum colors to the number you are willing to buy; the tool keeps the dominant colors and merges rare ones into their closest retained shade. Switching off smooth transitions reduces the count further.
• The outline broke upa dark outline that is one pixel wide in the source becomes intermittent in the grid. Thicken the outline in your image editor before converting, or choose a source image that already has a bold outline.

Printing and building from the PDF

The board-by-board PDF puts one 29 × 29 pegboard on each page, with the color code printed inside every cell and the row and column numbers along the edges. It is designed to be read from a printed sheet next to the board, not zoomed on a phone.

Print at 100% scale rather than “fit to page”, so every page keeps the same cell size and you can compare sheets. Greyscale printing is fine — the codes, not the ink color, tell you which bead goes where. If your printer swallows light tones, print the full pattern PDF in color instead and use the board sheets only for the codes.

Work board by board in the printed order, filling one row at a time from left to right. Keep the materials list beside you and sort each color into a separate cup before you start; sorting is the step that decides whether a large piece takes two hours or five.

Your image stays on your device

The conversion is JavaScript running in your browser, in a Web Worker so the interface stays responsive. There is no server that receives images, because there is no server at all — this is a static site.

That is also why there is no gallery, no account, and no “my projects” list. When you close the tab, the picture and the pattern are gone, so download your files before you leave.