How to turn a photo into Perler beads
Going from a photo to Perler beads means squeezing a picture of millions of pixels into a few dozen beads across. BeadBun divides your photo into one cell per bead. Instead of simply averaging each cell (which turns outlines into muddy in-between colors), it looks for the dominant color in every cell, so edges stay crisp. It then matches each cell to the nearest real bead color and reduces the palette to the number of colors you choose, keeping small but important details like eyes.
Photos with busy backgrounds
Pet photos and portraits are rarely taken on a plain wall. Turn on Cut out the subject and BeadBun finds the dog, cat, person or flower, removes the background and zooms in so the subject fills the whole bead pattern. It runs in your browser, so the photo stays on your device. For anything it misses, the magic wand removes connected areas of similar color with one click, and Undo brings back anything you didn't mean to remove.
Tips for a photo bead pattern that looks right
- Crop tight around the subject: a 29-bead-wide Perler pattern has no room for scenery.
- Raise saturation and contrast slightly. Beads look duller than a screen once ironed.
- Keep Clean up stray beads on to remove isolated single beads that are fiddly to place.
- Use the Paint and Swap tools to fix eyes, outlines and highlights by hand.
- If your image is already pixel art, switch to pixel art mode for a one-bead-per-pixel conversion.