Stencil Converter
Turn any photo into a clean black and white stencil: set the cut point, smooth away grain, drop the specks a knife cannot cut, and split it into up to three layers.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Turn any photo into a clean black and white stencil: set the cut point, smooth away grain, drop the specks a knife cannot cut, and split it into up to three layers.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
A stencil is a picture reduced to two states: the parts a knife cuts away and the parts that stay. This stencil converter makes that decision for every pixel with the Cut point slider - everything darker than the cut goes black and is what you cut, everything lighter stays as the sheet - and shows the result live, so you can drag until the face, the logo or the lettering reads as a shape. Use it to create a stencil from a photo for spray paint, a custom stencil for a wall or a T-shirt, a tattoo stencil outline, or a cut file for a plotter. The i-button on the stage tells you how much of the sheet is black, which is the amount you will be cutting.
A raw threshold of a photo is full of pinholes and grit, and none of it can be cut. Smoothing blurs the picture slightly before the cut, so film grain, JPG noise and skin texture settle into solid areas instead of a thousand dots. Remove specks under then flips every isolated black speck and every white pinhole smaller than the size you set - measured in pixels - to its surroundings, leaving only shapes big enough to cut. Between the two, a phone photo turns into something you can print on card and cut in one pass. Invert flips the logic when the subject is lighter than its background.
Layers splits the picture into two or three cut points instead of one. Layer 1 is the darkest tone, layer 2 everything up to the mid tone, layer 3 the light tone; sprayed in order from lightest to darkest, each layer over the last, they build a multi-tone image the way layered street-art stencils do. Show switches between the combined view and one layer at a time, and the download follows what is shown, so you get one clean black and white file per layer.
The stencil is pure black and white, which PNG stores losslessly and small; that is the default and the right choice for printing or for tracing into a cutter. WebP and JPG are smaller and fine for sharing, but both are lossy and soften the edges slightly. Copy puts the stencil on the clipboard, and Share on a phone sends it to a chat or a printing app.
Stencil sources are often faces, tattoos and logos that have not been published yet. The luminance pass, the smoothing, the speck removal and the layer split all run in the browser on your device. The image is never uploaded and no copy is kept.
Keep an eye on the white islands: any white shape fully surrounded by black falls out when you cut, because nothing connects it to the sheet. Raising Remove specks under fills the small ones automatically. Bigger islands - the catchlight in a dark iris, the inside of a letter O - need a bridge, a thin strip of white you add by hand in any editor, or a slightly lower cut point so the black around them breaks.
Start at the middle and drag. Portraits usually want the cut point a little higher so the face has enough black to read; backlit or high-key photos want it lower. Watch the coverage number in the i-button card: a spray stencil with more than about 60% black is mostly hole and tends to sag.
Yes. Set Layers to 2 or 3, check the combined view, then use Show to look at each layer alone and download it. Print all layers at the same size, cut each, and spray the lightest tone first.
Very fine, high-contrast texture - foliage, hair, fabric - sits right on the cut point and flips pixel by pixel. Raise Smoothing until the texture settles into solid areas, then raise the speck size to sweep up what is left. For a tattoo stencil, a simpler, well lit source photo beats any setting.
No. Everything runs locally in the browser; the photo never leaves your device and the download is built in memory.