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Stitch Toolbox

Automatic digitising

JPG to PES converter

Turn a JPG or JPEG photo or scan into a PES embroidery file for Brother and Baby Lock home and PR machines. The picture is digitised in your browser: real fills, satin columns and underlay, sized in millimetres, with a measured audit.

Drop a logo or picture
or click to choose, or paste from the clipboard
PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, SVG · the image stays on your device

No artwork at hand? Try a sample: · ·

JPG to PES: what is specific to this pair

Most logos arrive as a JPG: a screenshot, a file from a website, a scan of a business card. Two things make JPGs harder than they look. There is no transparency, so the background has to be recognised by colour; and compression surrounds every edge with a halo of slightly wrong pixels, which naive converters turn into extra thread colours and a fringe of stray stitches.

Here the halo colours are recognised as what they are: colours that exist almost only as rims thinner than half a millimetre beside a near-identical neighbour. They are folded into that neighbour before any stitch is planned, and specks smaller than the minimum detail are absorbed into whatever surrounds them. A compressed three-colour logo comes out as three threads.

The result is written as PES with the Brother palette index and thread colour for every block, so the machine shows sensible colours without a separate sheet.

How a JPG is read

  • JPG has no transparency, so the background is found by colour: the dominant colour along the frame is flooded in from the edges and removed. A logo on a plain white or coloured page works; a logo on a photograph does not.
  • JPEG compression leaves ringing, a faint halo of off-colour pixels around every edge. Left alone it becomes a second, slightly different red around your red. The digitiser detects colours that exist almost only as thin rims next to a near twin and folds them back in, which is why a JPG of a three-colour logo still comes out as three threads.
  • Colours are clustered in CIELAB, the colour space built around what the eye tells apart, and any two clusters closer than about 11 ΔE are merged: closer than that, no thread chart offers two different spools anyway.

What a PES file holds

  • Read by: Brother, Baby Lock and older Bernina machines.
  • Thread colours: an index into the machine maker's thread chart.
  • Trims: implicit (jump flags).
  • Longest stitch per record: 12.7 mm.
  • Written as version 1 with an embedded PEC block, which every Brother machine since the 1990s reads.

Before you export the JPG

  • Use the largest, least compressed copy you can find; a 300 px thumbnail has about one pixel per 0.3 mm at left-chest size, which is below what a satin column needs.
  • Crop to the logo so the frame colour really is the background.
  • A phone photo of a printed logo works if it is lit evenly and shot square on; shadows become extra colours.

What the digitiser does with it

Shapes under 0.9 mm wide become a triple running stitch, long shapes up to 3.4 mm satin columns that turn with the shape, and everything wider a staggered tatami fill with an edge walk and an underlay sewn across it. Rows are lengthened by the fabric's pull compensation, each colour runs a little under the next, and travel inside a shape is sewn as hidden running stitches rather than jumps. The main tool page has the full method with every number.

Already have a stitch file and only need a different format? That is a conversion, not digitising: use the embroidery file converter, which keeps every stitch to 0.1 mm.

Other inputs and formats

How to use it

  1. 1

    Add the JPG

    Drop, choose or paste it. Use the largest, least compressed copy you can find; a 300 px thumbnail has about one pixel per 0.3 mm at left-chest size, which is below what a satin column needs.

  2. 2

    Set the size and fabric

    Longest side in millimetres, and the fabric it will be sewn on. Both change the stitches.

  3. 3

    Check colours, preview and audit

    Merge or switch off colours, drag the compare slider, play the sew-out and read the audit.

  4. 4

    Download the PES

    PES is pre-selected; add other formats if you need them. The ZIP includes a colour sheet and the audit.

Questions

Why did the converter find more colours than my logo has?

Usually shading, a drop shadow or a photo background. Lower the colour limit, or merge two colours in the list; the preview and the audit update at once.

The white parts of my logo are missing.

On a white page, enclosed white areas are taken for letter holes and left open. If they are part of the design, such as eyes or white lettering, set Background to stitch enclosed areas of that colour.

Is my JPG uploaded?

No. The picture is read and digitised in your browser. When you download, a colour map of the design (a palette and one number per pixel) is sent so the server can build the files; the image itself never leaves your device.

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