Drop in an image
Drag any PNG, JPG or WebP onto the upload zone, or click to browse. Transparent backgrounds (PNGs) are detected automatically and left as empty cells, no bead needed. Solid-colour backgrounds (a white sticker on a white background, say) are detected via a flood-fill from the image edges, so you usually don't need to pre-process anything.
Pick a brand and palette size
Bitbead defaults the brand to whichever fits your interface language (Perler in English, Artkal in Chinese, Hama in Japanese), but you can change it any time — your choice is remembered. The "Max colours" slider caps how many distinct beads end up in the chart. Fewer colours means cheaper supplies and a more graphic look; more colours means smoother gradients.
Quality and dithering
The Quality control switches between three colour-matching algorithms: • Fast — Euclidean RGB. Nearly instant, fine for previews. • Standard — CIE94. Balanced. • High — CIEDE2000. Best perceptual fidelity, used by the pros. Dithering (Floyd–Steinberg) helps smooth gradients at the cost of a slightly noisier result — useful for photos, less so for clean line art.
Tweak, then export
Once happy with the auto-result, switch to brush, eraser, magic wand or picker to clean up stray pixels by hand. The bead count and shopping list update live. When ready, export to PNG (high-res chart for printing) or PDF (cover + materials list + grid pages with colour codes baked in).