About DrillPattern
A free tool that turns any photo into a printable diamond painting chart, matched to real DMC drill colours — with no sign-up, no watermark and no upload.
Why this exists
Diamond painting has a simple problem at its centre: the designs you can buy are whatever a factory decided to print. If you want your own dog, your grandmother's wedding photo, or a picture of your own house on a canvas, your options are to pay a custom charting service, or to wrestle with desktop software that was designed for cross-stitch and never quite fits.
DrillPattern was built to close that gap. Upload a photo, pick a canvas size, and get back something you can actually work from: a symbol chart, a colour chart, and an exact shopping list of DMC codes and drill quantities.
How the colour matching works
Most converters match colours by comparing raw RGB values, which produces muddy, off-looking charts because RGB distance does not match how the eye perceives colour differences. DrillPattern instead converts every pixel into the CIE-Lab perceptual colour space and measures distance there — the same approach professional charting software uses.
Those matched colours are then resolved against the 454 DMC floss shades, so every symbol on your chart corresponds to a code you can actually buy drills for. The palette is reduced with k-means clustering, and optional Floyd–Steinberg dithering blends neighbouring drills to fake gradients that a flat palette cannot reach on its own.
Features you will not find everywhere
- Confetti reduction — merges isolated stray drills into their surroundings, so you are not placing a single drill of one colour in the middle of another
- Hover to highlight — rest the cursor on the chart and every drill of the same colour stays sharp while the rest dims, which makes colour-blocking sections far faster
- Paged printing — large canvases are split across pages with an overlap row and column, so you can tape sheets together and work on a big design without a plotter
- Bag estimates — drill counts per colour, converted into the number of 200-drill bags you need to order, with 10% spare built in
- Progress tracking — tick off cells as you place them; progress is saved per pattern in your own browser
- Background removal — pick a background colour and matching pixels become empty cells, dropped from the material list so you do not buy drills you will never place
Who it is for
Crafters turning personal photos into gifts. Sellers who need custom charts for customers without paying per-pattern. And anyone who has stared at a half-finished canvas trying to work out whether that faint symbol is 3799 or 3802 — the symbol chart and hover highlighting are built for exactly that moment.
Why it is free
There is no sign-up, no watermark and no per-pattern fee. Running costs are low because the heavy lifting happens on your own device rather than on a server, and the site is supported by the advertising shown alongside it. Nothing about your photos is ever sent to us — see the privacy policy for the details.
Credits
Colour data is derived from the open-source DMC floss dataset (454 shades). Diamond painting is a craft with many regional names — diamond art, diamond embroidery, 钻石画 — and the terminology here follows the most common English usage.
Ready to try it? The tool works entirely offline once the page has loaded.