How to Convert Photos to Stitches Using PaintStitch™

There’s something about a framed embroidery piece that a printed photo just can’t match. It takes time, it’s tactile, and when you get it right, it looks like nothing else. The problem is that turning a real image into a realistic stitched design has traditionally required a lot of manual digitizing work — not ideal if you want to spend more time at the machine and less time in front of a screen.

That’s where PaintStitch™ comes in. It’s one of the more powerful tools inside DRAWings PRO, and once you understand how it works, converting a photo into a photorealistic embroidery design becomes a process you can actually control — not just hope for the best with.

This post walks through a flower bouquet project that also includes a negative space “LOVE” lettering effect. It’s a good example because it combines image conversion, design shaping, and finishing decisions that come up in most real projects.

Why PaintStitch™ Works Differently

Most embroidery fill types work by mapping out shapes and filling them with a stitch direction and density you define. PaintStitch™ takes a different approach — it reads the color data from a bitmap image and generates stitches that replicate the tonal variation in the original photo. That’s what gives it the painterly, photorealistic quality that regular fills can’t produce.

This also means the quality of your source image matters more than it does with hand-digitized designs. A clean, high-resolution image gives the algorithm better data to work with, and the result reflects that directly in the stitch output.

Starting with the Right Image

For this project, the source is a PNG of a flower bouquet with a transparent background. That’s not just an aesthetic choice — it’s a practical one.

When you import a standard JPG or a PNG without transparency, the software generates stitches across the entire rectangular bounding area of the image. That includes the background. If your bouquet sits on a white or light background, you’ll get unwanted stitching outside the flowers unless you manually clip those areas out later.

A transparent PNG removes that problem from the start. DRAWings PRO recognizes the alpha channel and only generates stitches in the non-transparent region. The result is a clean design with no background fill to deal with.

To bring the image in, create a new file and use the “From File” icon in the top toolbar. When the import dialog appears, select Open as PaintStitch™ as the conversion type. Before confirming, make sure the DPI is set to at least 300. This affects the stitch density and detail level in the output — lower DPI values produce coarser results, and for a realistic floral design, detail matters.

Handling Transparency Properly

Once the image is imported, it lands in a rectangular frame by default — which is how DRAWings PRO handles all bitmaps initially. For a transparent PNG, there’s an additional step you should take.

In the Convert menu, there’s an option to convert Transparency into clipping region. Enabling this automatically removes the transparent areas from the stitch field, which gives you that clean, shaped outline around the bouquet rather than a rectangle full of stitching.

After that, use the Node editor to review the outline and remove any stray nodes or unwanted areas. It’s a quick pass, but worth doing before you invest time in fine-tuning the color settings.

Setting the Design Size

Once the design looks clean in the editor, switch to Selection mode and set your dimensions. For this particular project, the goal is a finished piece that fits a specific picture frame, so the width is set to 180 mm.

Keep the Proportional option enabled when you type in the width — this scales the height automatically and prevents distortion. After sizing, center the design to the hoop.

This step matters more than it might seem. Getting your dimensions locked in before adjusting PaintStitch™ properties means that any stitch recalculation happens at the final size. If you resize after setting your colors and contrast, the software recalculates and your settings may shift slightly.

Adjusting PaintStitch™ Properties

This is where most of the creative work happens, and it’s also where people tend to either get great results or wonder why the design doesn’t look the way they expected.

Open the PaintStitch™ properties panel. The first thing to set is your thread palette — this should match the thread brand you’re actually going to stitch with, because the software maps colors from the image to real thread colors in that palette.

The default import for this bouquet comes in at 15 colors. That’s not necessarily a problem, but several of those colors are close enough to each other that they don’t add meaningful visual information — they just add color stops during stitching. Reducing from 15 to 10 colors makes the embroidery process faster at the machine without losing visible detail in the finished piece. You can experiment with the number in real time and watch the workspace update, which makes it easier to find the right balance.

Contrast is the other setting worth adjusting here. For this design, the contrast is raised to 5. A slightly higher contrast makes the color differences between thread areas more defined, which helps the bouquet read clearly from a distance. It’s a small change that has a noticeable effect on the final look.

Leave the remaining settings at their defaults unless you have a specific reason to change them. The default stitch parameters in PaintStitch™ are calibrated for typical photo conversion results, and chasing marginal improvements through multiple settings at once makes it harder to know what’s actually working.

Adding the Negative Space Text

The LOVE lettering in this design isn’t embroidered — it’s cut out of the bouquet using the Trim function. The result is that the word appears as a gap in the stitching, showing the fabric underneath. It’s a technique that works well with dense fill types like PaintStitch™ because the contrast between the stitched area and the bare fabric is sharp.

To set it up, activate the Lettering tool and type “LOVE” in capitals using font xpg044 at size 60. Switch to Selection mode and center the text by setting both X and Y coordinates to zero. Then adjust the proportions — disable Proportional and set the Height to 55 mm. This makes the letters wider relative to their height and gives the word more visual weight in the composition.

With the lettering still selected, hold Shift and click the bouquet design to select both. Go to Shaping → Trim. This subtracts the letter shapes from the bouquet stitching area, leaving the negative space. Once the trim is applied, delete the lettering object — it was only needed to define the cutout shape, and it’s no longer part of the design.

The reason this technique works better than simply placing text on top of the design is that there’s no overlap to manage. The design is a single element with the letters already carved into it, so there are no stitch layers fighting each other underneath.

Finishing Touches Before Sending to Machine

Before exporting, use the Fabric selection dialog to choose a background color for the workspace. This doesn’t affect the stitching — it changes the canvas color in the software so you can preview how your thread colors will look against the actual fabric you plan to use. For a bouquet design with light pinks and whites, a dark navy or deep green fabric shows the colors well. A cream or white fabric gives a softer result.

Once you’re satisfied with how it looks, send the design to your machine.

Materials and Stitching

For the physical materials, you’ll need a hoop, your fabric of choice, iron-on stabilizer, the thread colors called out in the design, and a frame if you’re planning to display the finished piece.

Stabilizer is worth thinking about more carefully than usual for PaintStitch™ designs. Because the fill generates dense stitching across a large area, the fabric takes more stress than it would with a lighter design. One layer of iron-on stabilizer is the standard starting point, but for this project a second layer is added. That extra support prevents fabric distortion during stitching and keeps the design flat when it’s framed.

Embroider the design, changing thread colors as the machine prompts you. When it’s done, remove the piece from the hoop and center it in the frame.

What Makes This Workflow Worth Knowing

The combination of PaintStitch™ and a transparent PNG source is one of the more reliable paths to a photorealistic embroidery design inside DRAWings PRO. The transparency handling removes a lot of the cleanup work that would otherwise happen in the Node editor, and the real-time property preview means you’re making informed decisions rather than guessing.

The negative space lettering through Trim is also a technique that carries over to other project types. Any time you want to carve a shape out of a dense fill — text, geometric cutouts, borders — the same logic applies.

If you haven’t worked much with the PaintStitch™ fill type before, a photo with clear color contrast and a transparent background is the best place to start. The bouquet project in this post is a good template: the source image is simple enough to work cleanly, and the result is a finished, frameable piece that holds up well as a practical introduction to what the tool can do.

You can download the .DRAW file of the project and the image used, for free, from the link below:

• Project’s .DRAW file: How to Convert Photos to Stitches Using PaintStitch™

It can open only with the XII and later versions of DRAWings embroidery software

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