Image to STL Converter
Convert a picture into a 3D printable STL file. Brightness becomes height, and you can turn the model to see it before you download.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Convert a picture into a 3D printable STL file. Brightness becomes height, and you can turn the model to see it before you download.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
The picture never leaves your device.
An STL file describes a solid as a shell of triangles, and it is what almost every slicer and 3D printer expects to be handed. A picture is not a solid, so converting one means deciding what the third dimension is going to be, and the answer that works for photographs, logos, signatures and line art alike is brightness. Every point in the picture gets a height taken from how light or dark it is - a height map, sometimes called a depth map - and that surface is then closed off with walls and a flat base so the result is a proper watertight solid rather than a sheet of triangles.
Drop a PNG or JPG in and the model appears immediately. Every change to the settings redraws it straight away, so you are never guessing what the downloaded file will contain, and there is no upload, no queue and no waiting for a server to answer. The picture is read, measured and turned into a mesh entirely in your browser, and it never leaves your device.
Load the picture, choose Relief, Lithophane or Extrude, and set four numbers: how wide the model should be in millimetres, how deep the relief goes, how thick the flat base under it is, and how much mesh detail you want. The panel keeps telling you the finished dimensions, the number of triangles and the size of the file as you change them, so nothing about the result is a surprise when the download starts.
Relief raises the light parts of the picture, which is the natural choice for embossing a nameplate, a coin-style medallion or a carved-looking panel. Invert it and the light parts sink instead, which is how you engrave rather than emboss. Lithophane does the opposite: dark parts come out thicker, so when the finished panel is lit from behind, the thick parts block more light and the photograph reappears in the glow. Choosing it switches the preview to the backlit view straight away, because that is the only view in which a lithophane looks like its picture - lit from the front its relief is the negative of the photograph, and a bump where you expect a dip. The bulb turns the light off again if you want to see the shape itself.
Extrude is the one to use for a logo, a silhouette, a stencil or a sign. Instead of reading the picture as a landscape of heights, it cuts the shape out at a single cut-off and stands it up with a flat top and clean vertical sides. The outline is worked out inside each mesh cell rather than at its corners, so a curve comes out as a curve instead of a staircase, and holes inside a shape stay holes. Turn the backing plate off and the shape stands on its own with nothing behind it.
All three are starting points rather than fixed modes: every slider stays free afterwards, and Invert height flips the direction of any of them.
Normally the picture is read as grey and its lightness becomes the height, which is what you want for a photograph. Height from: Colour reads the hue instead, on the scale every relief map has used for a century: blue is the lowest ground, then cyan, green and yellow, and red is the highest. Five letters in five colours come out at five different heights, where reading their brightness would have left several of them level with each other. Grey pixels have no hue to read, so the further a colour falls toward grey the more the height falls back to plain brightness, which means a black and white picture behaves the same in either setting instead of collapsing flat.
The preview is a real 3D view, not a picture of one. Drag it to turn the model over, scroll or pinch to zoom, and drag with two fingers, the right mouse button or Shift held down to slide it aside so you can look at a corner up close. Twist two fingers to spin the model round in the plane of the screen, the way you would turn a photograph on a table; on a mouse that is Shift and the wheel. Zooming works around the pointer, so whatever you are pointing at stays where it is. Double-click puts the view back where it started.
Colour preview paints the model with the picture's own colours, which makes a logo instantly recognisable on screen. It changes the view and nothing else: an STL file has nowhere to record colour, so the model you download is a single colour and prints in whatever filament you load. Switch it off to read the shape rather than the picture. The bulb in the corner of the preview switches the backlight on and off. Lithophane mode turns it on for you; on a relief it is a quick way to read how thick the model gets. Fullscreen is next to it when you want a proper look before committing to a print.
Size is the width of the model in millimetres. The height follows from the shape of your picture, so a wide photograph stays wide. Depth is how far the relief rises above the base, and it is the control that decides whether the result reads as a picture or as a faint texture. Base thickness is the solid slab underneath, which is what stops the model being fragile and gives the printer something flat to start on.
Detail is the number of points across the long side of the mesh, from 80 to 1000. More detail means finer features and a much larger file, since the triangle count grows with the square of it. There is a sensible ceiling: a printer with a 0.4 mm nozzle cannot place features finer than about 0.1 mm, so a 100 mm wide model gets nothing useful past the top of the slider. Smoothing averages the heights over a small neighbourhood, which takes the grain out of a photograph and stops sensor noise printing as a rough sandpaper surface.
The rest of the controls follow in the same panel. Drop background takes a FLAT backdrop out of the picture: it finds the colour at the edges of the frame by itself, and you can override the colour with the swatch or widen the tolerance. It measures the difference in colour rather than in brightness, so a shadow falling across a backdrop still goes, and it falls back to brightness when the backdrop is white or grey, which is what stops a white sweep taking a grey subject with it. What it drops is genuinely removed: the model's outline follows what is left, so a logo on white comes out as the logo and nothing else, rather than as a rectangular slab with the logo raised on it. Turn Backing plate back on if you want the slab, for a plaque. It deliberately errs on the side of removing too little: on a backdrop that shades from one tone to another, which is most rooms, it will clear the part nearest the sampled colour and leave the rest for you to decide about, because a key wide enough to swallow a whole gradient is also wide enough to swallow the subject. Clean up drops islands and pinholes smaller than a chosen size, so a noisy photograph does not extrude as confetti. Levels terraces the heights onto a fixed number of steps, for a contour-map look. Mirror flips the model, which is what you want if it is going to be cast or pressed. Units switches every measurement between millimetres and inches.
Only brightness is used, so the picture is effectively converted to grayscale on the way in and colour makes no difference at all. Contrast is what you are printing: pictures with a clear range from dark to light convert best, and flat, hazy ones come out shallow. If the model looks washed out, raising the contrast of the picture first does far more good than turning the depth up, because depth stretches the range you already have rather than creating one.
Busy backgrounds become bumpy ones. A portrait against a plain wall, a logo on white, a signature, a mountain skyline or a piece of line art all convert cleanly, while a crowded street scene turns into noise at printable sizes. Cropping to the subject with the image cropper before converting is usually the single biggest improvement you can make. For a stencil-like sign or a two-level badge, Extrude already does the cutting for you, and the black and white converter or the threshold filter can clean the picture up first if the shape is not clearly separated from its background.
Transparent PNGs are handled properly: anything transparent sits flat on the base in both directions, so a logo cut out of its background rises as a raised shape on a clean slab instead of embossing the background with it. If your logo still has a background, the chroma key remover will take a flat colour out of it.
The STL that downloads is a watertight solid, so slicers accept it without a repair step, and you can confirm that for yourself in the STL viewer before you slice anything. It arrives lying flat with the picture facing up, which is how a relief plaque is normally printed, and every part of it is supported by the layer underneath, so no supports are needed.
Lithophanes are the exception and are usually printed standing on edge, so the layers run across the picture rather than along it, which is what gives them their fine tonal steps. The usual recipe is a base around 0.8 mm and a depth around 2.4 mm, which is what the Lithophane preset sets, printed in white or natural filament with a high infill so light cannot leak through gaps. If you are unsure how large to go, remember that a lithophane needs enough width for the tones to separate: 100 mm is a good starting size, and much below 60 mm the picture starts closing up.
The picture never leaves your device. It is decoded, measured and turned into a mesh in your browser, and the STL is assembled in memory and handed straight to your downloads folder. There is no upload, no account, no watermark, no size limit imposed by a server and no queue, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected once it is open.
Load the picture on this page, pick Relief or Lithophane, set the size, depth and detail you want, then press Download STL. The conversion reads the brightness of every point in the image as a height, builds a closed solid from it and writes a binary STL file ready to open in any slicer.
Yes, and also JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP, SVG and anything else your browser can open as an image. PNG has one advantage: transparent areas are treated as flat, so a logo saved with a transparent background comes out as a raised shape on a clean base rather than carrying its background with it.
Load it and choose Extrude. The shape is cut out at a single cut-off and stood up with a flat top and clean vertical sides, and the outline is worked out inside each mesh cell, so curves come out smooth instead of stepped. A dark logo on a light page comes out raised, not engraved - the smaller part of the picture is taken to be the shape. Turn the backing plate off if you want the logo on its own.
Switch on Drop background in the panel. It reads the colour around the edges of the frame and cuts it away, so the model becomes the shape of what is left rather than a rectangle, and the size read-out changes to the size of that shape. Turn Backing plate on if you would rather keep the rectangle and have the background merely flattened. It works best on a plain backdrop, and it is deliberately cautious: if it leaves too much, widen the tolerance or set the background colour by hand with the swatch beside the switch. A backdrop that shades across the frame cannot be taken out by one colour, and neither can a busy one; crop it out instead.
Yes. Units sits at the foot of the panel, and switching it changes the size, depth and base thickness sliders and every read-out on the page. It does not change the model - the STL is the same file either way, and slicers read it the same.
A lithophane is a thin panel whose thickness varies with a picture, so it looks like a blank white plate until light shines through it and the image appears. Choose Lithophane here and the dark parts of your photograph become the thick parts. Press the bulb on the preview to see it lit before you print, and print it standing on edge in white filament with high infill.
Between 2 and 5 millimetres suits most reliefs at a 100 millimetre size, and lithophanes want much less: about 2.4 millimetres of depth on a 0.8 millimetre base. Going deeper does not add detail, it only exaggerates the range of brightness the picture already has, and past a point it turns gentle gradients into cliffs the printer has to bridge.
Yes. The mesh is closed rather than a bare surface, with walls dropping to a flat base and every edge used by exactly two triangles, so slicers do not need to repair it. It is written as binary STL, which is about a fifth of the size of the ASCII form and is what every slicer reads fastest.
The panel tells you before you download, in triangles and megabytes, and it updates as you move the sliders. The size follows the detail setting and the shape of the picture: 300 points across a 4:3 image is about 6.5 MB, and the maximum of 1000 runs to tens of megabytes. Every triangle costs exactly 50 bytes in a binary STL, so doubling the detail roughly quadruples the file.
No, and no tool that works from a single flat picture can. This builds a relief: the brightness of the image becomes height, so a face comes out as a carved panel rather than as a head you could walk around. That is exactly what you want for plaques, lithophanes, coins, signs and logos, and it is not what you want if you need a true model of a physical object.
The mesh works anywhere an STL works, so CNC relief carving is a good fit and many people use the same file for it. Depth means cutting depth there, so keep it modest and remember that your cutter has a radius, which rounds off detail finer than the tool itself.
Flat usually means the picture has little contrast, so raise the contrast of the image before converting rather than raising the depth. Noisy usually means a photograph with visible grain or a busy background: turn Smoothing up, which averages the heights over a small area, and crop to the subject.
Drag it to turn the model, scroll or pinch to zoom, and drag with two fingers, the right mouse button or Shift held to move it sideways. Twisting two fingers spins the model in the plane of the screen, and Shift with the wheel does the same on a mouse. Zoom happens around the pointer, so the part you are pointing at stays put, and a double-click resets everything. The preview is live, so any change to the sliders shows up in it immediately.
No, and no STL file can. The format stores triangles and nothing else, with no room for colour, so a coloured STL is not a thing that exists in any standard sense. The colour preview here is a viewing aid that makes a logo easy to recognise while you set it up; the file you download is plain geometry and prints in whichever single filament your printer has loaded. Multi colour prints come from your slicer and printer, by changing filament at set layers, not from the model file.
Yes, that is Height from: Colour. Rather than reading the picture as grey, it places each hue on a relief map scale, with blue lowest and red highest through cyan, green and yellow. It is the setting to use when your picture is colour coded rather than shaded, for example a logo whose letters are different colours but similar brightness. Where a colour is close to grey it has no meaningful hue, so the height falls back to brightness there.
No. Everything happens in your browser on your device, and the STL is built in memory and saved straight to your downloads. Nothing is transmitted, there is no account, and the page keeps working once it is open even with the network disconnected.