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Turn a photo into a fuse-bead pattern

The goal is a pattern you can actually place on a pegboard: readable from a short distance, limited to the site’s bead colors, and simple enough to build. Mandolin Handmade’s Import Image tool does that conversion locally in the browser. It is not an upload service and it uses a fixed color-matching method.

Choose a good source image

Fuse beads are a coarse grid. A 29 × 29 board has 841 cells; a 14 × 14 board has 196. A phone photo of a busy room has thousands of tiny color changes that cannot survive that reduction. The converter will still produce a grid, but the result often looks like noise instead of a subject.

Images that convert well tend to have a clear subject, strong edges, and a limited number of large color areas. Think of a simple object on a plain background, a logo-like silhouette, a cartoon-style character, or a centered item photographed against a wall or table. High contrast helps: dark next to light reads as an outline after the photo is sampled onto the grid.

Crowded scenes, tiny facial features, complex gradients, and busy backgrounds work against you. Hair flyaways, text at small type sizes, and distant landscapes usually collapse into mixed beads. If the subject is a small part of a larger photo, crop before you import, or use Import Image’s zoom and drag controls so the subject fills the preview. A tighter crop of one object almost always beats converting the whole original frame.

Import Image accepts PNG, JPG, and WebP from your device, up to 20 MB. Use the version of the picture that already looks like the thing you want to bead. You cannot recover detail the source never had.

Choose a grid size

Grid size is the first real design decision. A smaller grid uses fewer beads and is faster to place, but it can only hold a simple shape. A larger grid can keep more of the photo’s silhouette and interior colors, at the cost of more beads, more editing, and sometimes more printed pages.

Mandolin Handmade sizes are always listed as rows × columns. The Designer currently supports 14 × 14, 21 × 21, 29 × 29, 29 × 58, 29 × 87, 58 × 29, 58 × 58, 58 × 87, 87 × 29, 87 × 58, and 87 × 87. Import Image uses the same list. For a first photo conversion, 29 × 29 is a common starting point: one square board of detail without committing to a multi-board build. A simple icon or silhouette can live on 14 × 14. A recognizable logo or a more detailed character usually needs 29 × 29 or larger.

If you are unsure, convert at 29 × 29 first and look at the bead preview. If the subject is still a blob, move up a size rather than chasing more zoom on a grid that cannot hold the shape. The pegboard size guide walks through every supported size, including portrait versus landscape rectangles.

How Import Image works

Open the Fuse-Bead Designer and choose Import Image. Select a file on this device. The conversion runs in your browser. The photo is not uploaded to Mandolin Handmade for matching. The same source file and the same settings produce the same grid; the process is deterministic, not a new generated picture each time.

After you pick a file, you choose a grid size and a conversion mode. Two previews appear: Original / crop, and Bead preview. The crop view is a cover crop of the image fitted to the grid’s aspect ratio. Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Fit change how much of the photo is included. You can drag the crop preview to pan. Use that to keep the subject centered and to exclude leftover background. Fit returns the crop to the default cover placement.

Transparent pixels are treated as empty cells, not as a bead color. If a PNG has a see-through background, those areas become gaps on the pegboard. When a PNG has transparent padding around the subject, Import Image can use the opaque content bounds so the subject is not surrounded by a large empty margin. That is useful for sticker-style art and cut-out objects. A fully opaque photograph does not get that inset; the whole frame is the crop source.

When the bead preview looks close enough to start from, choose Use This Pattern. The grid loads into the Designer. Import Image is a starting point, not a finished build. Almost every photo conversion needs some cleanup by hand.

Balanced and Simplified modes

Conversion has two modes: Balanced and Simplified. Balanced is the default. It maps each sampled area of the photo to the nearest color in the site’s bead palette, then runs a lighter cleanup pass. Use it when you want the result to stay closer to the original coloring.

Simplified increases contrast and reduces color variety before matching, then applies a stronger cleanup pass. Isolated specks and tiny noisy patches are more likely to disappear. Large shapes tend to flatten into fewer colors. Use it when a photo is grainy, full of similar mid-tones, or when you would rather start from a bolder graphic than from a close color copy.

Neither mode invents new subject matter. Both still have to fit the photo onto the grid you chose. If the source is a cluttered scene, Simplified will not magically extract one object. Crop first, then compare the two modes on the bead preview before you load the pattern.

Color matching, in plain terms

A photograph can contain millions of slightly different colors. Fuse beads cannot. Mandolin Handmade’s Designer uses a 56-color palette. Import Image maps the sampled photo onto those bead colors. Skin tones, sky gradients, and subtle shadows usually collapse into a handful of nearby beads.

Exact photographic color reproduction is not the goal. Visual recognizability is. A tree that reads as a dark trunk and a green mass is more useful than a grid that tries to keep every leaf highlight. If two beads look almost the same on the pegboard, merging them during cleanup often makes the pattern easier to build without changing what the picture is.

After conversion you can still change any cell in the Designer. Palette matching is the first assignment of colors, not a lock. If a face comes out too speckled, replace the noisy beads with one or two colors. If a logo needs a specific outline color, draw it in after import.

Clean up the result in the Designer

Once the pattern is on the grid, treat it like a drawing. The Designer tools that matter here are Draw, Erase, Pick, and Fill. Draw places the selected color. Erase removes a bead and leaves an empty cell. Pick samples a color from an existing bead so you can match it elsewhere. Fill can fill a connected empty area or replace a color throughout the design, depending on where you click.

Typical cleanup after a photo import: delete leftover background beads, thicken a weak outline so it survives at pegboard scale, remove one-bead “dirt” in large flat areas, and simplify facial features that became a few scattered dots. If the subject is supposed to be a silhouette, erase everything that is not the silhouette. If you want a hanging ornament with a shaped edge, erase the background and leave empty cells around the form.

You can also add or remove beads after import. Color filters in the Designer are optional and restyle the current grid; they are not part of Import Image. Undo and Redo help when a fill goes too far. If you would rather start from a human-made design, open Community Patterns and customize it in the same editor.

Check bead counts before you build

The Designer keeps a running count of how many beads of each color the pattern uses, plus a total. Empty cells are not beads. Look at those counts before you shop or start placing. A conversion that looks fine on screen can still ask for dozens of near-identical colors; merging a few of them in the editor reduces both the shopping list and the chance of mixing similar beads on the board.

If you plan several designs, save them to Projects on this device. Projects can combine bead counts from more than one saved design into a single shopping list. That is separate from the public gallery.

Print when the pattern looks buildable

Printing is how the on-screen grid becomes a physical template. Mandolin Handmade’s Print PDF uses 5.0 mm center-to-center spacing so the printed circles can line up with a standard fuse-bead pegboard when you print at actual size. Large grids are split across pages rather than shrunk. The details—printer settings, page order, and what appears on the PDF—are in How to print fuse-bead patterns at actual size .

A practical checkpoint before you print: squint at the grid. If you can still name the subject, it is ready enough to bead. If you cannot, either increase the grid size and convert again, or simplify the drawing until the silhouette is obvious.