Photo to cartoon converter
Choose a photo and it is redrawn as a cartoon: the picture is smoothed, every colour is rounded to a few flat steps, and strong edges become black outlines. Move the sliders to get anything from a soft poster look to a bold comic style, then download the result.
Runs in your browser: nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Choose or drop a photo.
- Set Colour steps per channel: fewer steps give a flatter, bolder look.
- Set Smoothing to remove fine texture before the colours are cut.
- Set Outline strength and Line width for the black lines.
- Download the cartoon. It keeps the size of the original; JPEG and WebP files stay in their format, others are saved as PNG.
How it works
- Smoothing: a fast blur, three box blurs in a row, which is close to a Gaussian blur with the chosen radius in pixels.
- Flat colours: each channel value v is rounded to one of n steps: round(v / 255 × (n − 1)) × 255 / (n − 1).
- Outlines: the Sobel operator measures how fast brightness changes around each pixel, as |Gx| + |Gy|. A pixel becomes black when that value reaches the threshold 60 + (100 − strength) × 6, so 100 % uses 60 and 50 % uses 360. Line width grows each line pixel into a square of that size.
Example
With 2 steps a channel value of 100 becomes round(100 / 255) = 0, and 200 becomes round(0.78) = 1, which is 255. With 3 steps the levels are 0, 128 and 255, so 100 rounds to the middle one, 128.
A sharp border between dark grey (40) and light grey (220) gives an edge value of (220 − 40) × 4 = 720, well above 60, so it is drawn as a black line even at 50 % strength (threshold 360).
Tips
- Portraits look best with 4–6 steps, smoothing 3–5 px and a moderate outline.
- For a poster or pop-art look, use 2–3 steps and no lines.
- Noisy low-light photos make many small lines: raise smoothing first, then lower the outline strength.
Frequently asked questions
How does the cartoon effect work?
In three steps. The photo is blurred a little so skin, sky and walls become even. Each of red, green and blue is then rounded to a few evenly spaced steps, which turns gradients into flat areas. Finally an edge detector (the Sobel operator on brightness) finds strong edges, and those pixels are painted black.
What do colour steps mean?
The number of values each colour channel may take. With 2 steps a channel is either 0 or 255, so the whole picture uses at most 8 colours. With 5 steps there are up to 125 colours, which keeps faces natural while still looking drawn.
Why are there too many or too few lines?
Outline strength sets how strong an edge must be to become a line: at 100 % even soft edges are drawn, at low values only the sharpest ones, and at 0 % there are no lines at all. More smoothing also removes small edges such as skin texture and leaves, so fewer lines appear.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The picture is decoded and processed by your browser on your device, and the download is created there too.
Will the saved file look like the preview?
Yes, closely. The preview is drawn smaller, and smoothing and line width are scaled down with it, so the saved file at full size has the same look with finer detail.