Free Perler Bead
Pattern Maker

The Perler bead pattern maker runs in three passes, and each one is visible on this page rather than hidden behind a submit button. First you crop, because the aspect ratio you keep decides how many pegboards the finished piece needs. Then the image is resampled to the bead grid you asked for, and every cell is matched against a real manufacturer palette. Finally you correct whatever the automatic match got wrong and export the result.

Matching is the part that separates a usable pattern from a pretty picture. Colors are converted from sRGB into CIELAB and compared with the CIEDE2000 distance formula, which models how different two colors look to a human eye rather than how far apart their RGB numbers happen to be. A naive RGB comparison will happily swap a warm grey for a cold one; a perceptual metric will not. That is why the bead pattern maker can shrink a photograph to a few dozen plastic colors and still keep skin tones, shadows, and brand colors recognisable.

Everything happens inside your browser. The image never leaves your machine, there is no account to create, and no server sees the picture you dropped in. That also means the bead pattern maker keeps working on a slow connection once the page has loaded, and that a private photo stays private.

Four manufacturer palettes ship with this fuse bead pattern maker, and the one you pick changes both the colors offered and the codes printed on the export. Perler Midi covers 124 currently sold 5 mm colors. Hama Midi covers 88 current 5 mm H-codes. Artkal S adds 225 colors in the same 5 mm size, and MARD 291 covers 291 colors at 2.6 mm for miniature work. Choosing a palette is not a style preference — it is a declaration of which beads are actually sitting in your drawer.

Similar-looking colors across brands are not interchangeable. A Perler code and a Hama code that land close together on screen can fuse to visibly different results, because the plastics, finishes, and ironing behaviour differ. The bead pattern maker therefore never mixes two brands into one pattern. If you want to check a specific color before you commit a whole project to it, open thePerler bead color chartor theHama bead colour chart, both of which label every swatch with the evidence behind it.

Screen values are references, not promises. Monitor calibration, ambient light, production batch, finish, and how hard you iron all move the final appearance. The honest way to read any preview here is as a shortlist rather than a proof — the reasoning is set out in thecolor accuracy guide.

The bead pattern maker and the color charts read the same data, and each brand keeps its own page because the catalogs are not interchangeable. Discontinued codes are flagged rather than deleted — a chart that quietly drops a retired color is useless the moment you find that color in an old tub.

In this bead pattern maker, physical sizing and board boundaries follow the selected bead system. Perler, Hama, Artkal, and MARD options distinguish Classic, Midi, Mini, Maxi, Caps, and hard or soft Artkal series instead of treating a whole brand as one palette. MARD also includes exact retail-set presets from 24 to 291 colors. Pattern height continues to follow the crop ratio, so a portrait and a landscape can use the same width without distortion.

The color limit caps how many distinct beads the pattern is allowed to use. Start from 8, 12, 16, or 20 colors, or type an exact number. Lowering it produces a cleaner, more poster-like result and a much shorter shopping list; raising it preserves gradients at the cost of buying colors you will use four times each. For most photographs a limit somewhere between sixteen and thirty colors is the point where the picture still reads clearly and the material list stays affordable.

Dithering trades flat areas for the illusion of extra colors by scattering two beads in a pattern your eye blends at a distance. Five diffusion methods are available — Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson, Sierra, Stucki, and Burkes — and the strength is continuous from zero. Atkinson keeps more contrast and less noise, which usually suits sprites and logos; Floyd–Steinberg is the safer default for photographs. Set it to zero for pixel art that was already drawn on a grid, because dithering a clean sprite only adds work at the ironing board.

Background removal deletes a flat backdrop so the finished piece can be cut out as a shape rather than a rectangle. The tolerance control decides how far from the sampled color the removal reaches, which matters when a photo background is a gradient rather than a single value.

No bead pattern maker gets eyes, lettering, or a logo edge right on the first automatic pass, so the grid stays fully editable. Five tools are available: Move to pan around a large pattern, Paint to set a cell, Erase to clear one back to empty, Pick to sample a color already in the pattern, and Fill to flood a contiguous region. Undo and redo cover every change, so experimenting costs nothing.

The edits that repay the most effort are small and specific. Give facial features a single dark bead rather than a smudge of three near-blacks. Straighten the outline of a letter so it reads at arm's length. Delete stray single beads left over from dithering in what should be a flat area — each one is a color you would otherwise have to buy. A few minutes in the editor routinely removes several entries from the shopping list the bead pattern maker generated.