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Turn a photo into a sketch

Pencil, charcoal or coloured pencil from any photo, previewed live and drawn on this device.

Turns a photo into a pencil sketch, charcoal drawing or coloured pencil sketch at full resolution. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The size limit is your device’s memory, and phones hold less; give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, and then it works offline.

Drop photos to sketchor click to choose files. Batches welcome.
    Working…

    Done

    Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.

    How it works

    1. Drop one or more photos (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF or JPEG XL).
    2. Pick pencil, charcoal or coloured pencil and adjust stroke width and darkness while you watch the preview.
    3. Press Make the sketch and download the drawings, one by one or as a zip.

    In your browser, not on a server

    Your browser decodes each photo (libheif or the Squoosh decoders step in for HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL) and draws it on a canvas. Each pixel becomes grey with the Rec. 709 weights, a negative copy is blurred with three passes of a box blur, which approximates a Gaussian, and the grey is divided by the blurred negative (a colour dodge): flat areas go white and edges stay as strokes. A gamma curve sets how dark the lines are. The canvas is saved as JPG or PNG.

    Compared with upload-based tools: Photo-to-sketch sites and apps upload your photos, often of family and friends, run them on a server and add watermarks or subscriptions. This effect needs no server or AI model, so here it runs on your device at full resolution.

    Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.

    Questions

    Which photos make the best sketches?

    Photos with clear edges and even light: a portrait by a window, a building, a pet against a plain wall. Busy backgrounds turn into scribbles, so crop tight or remove the background first. Very dark photos give heavy, smudgy sketches; brighten them first.

    What do stroke width and darkness change?

    Stroke width sets how far the effect looks around each edge: low values give fine pen-like lines, high values soft, shaded pencil. Darkness presses harder on every line. Charcoal starts darker and more contrasted than pencil.

    Is this AI?

    No. It is the classic colour dodge technique artists use in Photoshop: a grey copy of the photo is divided by a blurred negative of itself, so flat areas go white and edges stay as strokes. It is plain arithmetic on the pixels, with no AI model to download, so it gives the same result every time.

    Can I print the sketch?

    Yes. The sketch keeps the photo’s full resolution, so a 12 megapixel phone photo prints sharply at A4 or letter size. Save as PNG for printing line art without JPG speckles.

    Are my photos uploaded?

    No. Each photo is turned into a sketch pixel by pixel in your browser tab and saved from there. Family photos and portraits stay on your device.

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