Turning a photo into a bead pattern

Crop hard, pick a picture with big shapes, and cut the number of colours down before you buy anything.

A pattern 29 beads wide holds 841 pieces of information. A phone photo holds several million. Almost everything is thrown away in the conversion, and knowing what survives is most of the skill: large shapes, strong contrast, and clear edges survive. Everything else does not.

The test that predicts the result almost perfectly: shrink the photo on screen until it is the size of a postage stamp. If you can still tell what it is, it will convert. If it turns to mush at stamp size, no setting will rescue it, because the pattern is smaller than the stamp.

So crop hard. A face should fill the frame; a pet should fill the frame; a flower should fill the frame. The single most common failure is a subject photographed from three metres away, where the thing you care about occupies a fifth of the picture and therefore a fifth of the beads.

Backgrounds are the second problem. A busy background eats beads and colours without adding anything you wanted, and worse, it competes with the subject for contrast. A subject against a plain wall, a plain sky or plain grass converts far better than the same subject against a bookshelf.

Watch out for a subject the same brightness as what is behind it — a brown dog on a wooden floor, a white cat on a white sofa. Colour tells the two apart on screen, but at bead resolution the shapes merge and you get a silhouette of nothing. Reshoot against something darker or lighter if you can.

Once you have a pattern, cut the colour count before you go shopping. A photo will happily produce twenty-two colours, of which four are nearly the same grey. Merging those four into one loses nothing you can see at 5 mm and takes eighteen euros off the shopping list.

Backgrounds are also the best thing to delete outright. Dropping the background colour entirely leaves those pegs empty, which turns a square picture into a cut-out shape — usually better looking than the square, and several hundred beads cheaper.

Finally, resist raising the bead count to rescue detail. Going from 29 to 57 wide is four times the beads and four times the evening, and it almost never saves a photo that was too far away to begin with. Fix the crop instead; it is free.