Fur is the honest test of a continuous-tone sketch. The light side stays pale because it reflects more light, and the shaded side gains graphite without turning into a flat grey mass — every tuft that was visible in the photo is still visible in the drawing.
Detail 72 · Darkness 58
Parallel architecture is where Detail earns its name. At a high setting the tile rows come through as separate strokes; turn Detail down and they merge into bands of tone. Neither is wrong — one is a drawing of a roof, the other is a drawing of the light on a roof.
Detail 88 · Darkness 46
A dark shadow is the setting that exposes a bad sketch filter: press too hard and the shadow becomes one black shape. Here the shadow deepens but keeps its internal gradation, so the falloff from the jug to the table edge is still readable as a surface rather than a hole.
Detail 54 · Darkness 92
An outline records where a shape ends. A pencil sketch records how much light each part of the shape reflects, so the drawing carries the photograph’s own shading: the shadow under a brow, the lighter fur along a cat’s flank, the grain across a plaster wall. That continuous tone is why eyebrows and eyes still read as themselves instead of becoming two loops and a pair of dots.
This tool works in the browser on the pixels you picked. It converts the photo to luminance with proper luma weights, inverts that, blurs the inverse, and colour-dodges the luminance back over it — the classic pencil formula. Because the blur radius is what the Detail slider controls, Detail changes how many strokes the drawing has rather than how hard they are. Darkness then deepens the graphite through a tone curve that keeps a broad band of mid-greys, so a heavy setting presses harder without turning the picture into a silhouette.
Nothing is uploaded and no generation request is made. The photo is decoded, oriented, and drawn by this tab, and the PNG you download is the same picture at its original pixel dimensions.
Open a photo. The file is read in this tab; it is not uploaded and no image request leaves the browser.
Adjust Detail to choose the stroke: higher detail keeps finer texture and denser hatching, lower detail smooths small texture into broader, softer strokes.
Adjust Darkness to press harder or lighter. Mid-greys stay mid-grey at every setting; the shadows deepen first.
Drag the divider across the canvas to compare the drawing with the photograph at the same scale, then download a PNG at the original size.
Both sliders only recompute the drawing. The subject never moves, because every setting runs the same transform on the same decoded pixels — the geometry is never re-derived.
Detail sets the blur radius used by the colour-dodge step. A smaller radius keeps small luminance changes apart, so fine texture turns into many strokes; a larger radius averages them together, so the same texture becomes a few broad marks. At a 1600 px long edge the radius runs from 6 px at Detail 0 to 0.5 px at Detail 100, scaled with the image so a preview and the export agree.
Darkness sets how much graphite the tone curve deposits and how steeply it deepens the shadows. It moves the whole drawing along one smooth curve rather than clipping it, so every setting keeps a wide band of mid-greys and the highlights keep their structure.
They answer different questions. Detail is about how the drawing is made — how many marks describe a surface. Darkness is about how hard the pencil is pressed. Changing one never changes the other, and neither changes the subject: the same pixels are transformed either way.
A pencil drawing that keeps the eyebrows, the eyes, and the shape of the jaw is recognisable because those features come from the photograph rather than being redrawn. Use a moderate Detail so skin keeps a soft gradation, and raise Darkness only until the hair reads as hair.
High-frequency texture is where continuous tone beats a line tracer. Set Detail high so individual wisps survive, and keep Darkness moderate so the underside of the animal stays a mid-grey instead of collapsing into a block.
Straight edges and repeating detail are easy to check: parallel lines should stay parallel, and a flat wall should stay clean and light. A higher Detail setting separates tile rows, brick courses, and machined edges without adding invented texture.
Because the drawing preserves the original proportions and lighting, it works as a value study for a painting or as a drawing reference. Export at the original size and print or paint over it.
A greyscale graphite drawing is a clearer brief than a colour photo when you are describing shading. Send the line structure and the tone together, and let the artist choose the final contrast.
Four routes produce something pencil-like, and they are not interchangeable. The difference that matters is whether the result keeps the photograph’s continuous tone or replaces it with an outline, a redraw, or a person’s interpretation.
A continuous-tone graphite drawing that keeps the photograph’s shading, proportions, and texture, made locally in the browser.
Open a photo, set Detail for stroke fineness and Darkness for graphite depth, drag the divider to check it against the photo, and download a PNG at the original dimensions. No account, no credits, no request.
Two knobs, one output. It will not restyle the subject, add colour, or invent detail that is not in the photograph, and a photo with a very dark background will draw more graphite there because that is what the photo contains.
Clean outlines for colouring pages, logos, and vector work, where tone is not wanted.
Run an edge detector or a threshold over the photo and keep the lines. Many converters also offer a thicker or thinner stroke and a white background.
The output is an outline with no shading: fur becomes a contour around the animal, a shadow disappears entirely, and the eyebrow becomes one line instead of a shape with light and dark inside it. If you want to colour the result in, that is the right output.
A stylised illustration that should look like a drawing of the subject rather than a record of the photograph.
Upload the photo as a reference and let a generative model redraw it in a pencil style, often with a prompt or a strength setting.
The model re-draws the subject, so a portrait can come back flattering and atmospheric while the likeness drifts, and fur or hair can be invented rather than carried over. That is the better choice when you want an illustration; it is the wrong choice when you want this photograph as a sketch.
The best drawing you can get, and the only route that carries a person’s judgement about what to leave out.
Print or display the photo, block in the proportions, build the values layer by layer, and refine the texture last.
It takes hours rather than seconds and needs the skill to match. For a commission, a portfolio piece, or a gift, that time is the point; for a quick study or a dozen variants, it is not.
Choose by the output you actually need: this page when the photograph’s own shading and texture should survive, a line-art converter when you want an outline to colour in, an AI style tool when a redrawn illustration is the goal, and hand drawing when the drawing itself is the work.
These four IMG AI tools all start from one photo and all return an image, so the useful question is what kind of image each one makes.
| The problem | Photo to Sketch | Photo to Cartoon | Photo to Anime | Image Colorizer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it produces | Greyscale graphite with continuous tone | Flat colour cartoon art | Cel-shaded anime art | Colour added to existing line work |
| Keeps the original shading | Yes — mid-greys and shadows come from the photo | No — shading is replaced by flat colour and outlines | No — shading is replaced by cel bands | Only the colour; the lines stay as they are |
| Where it runs | Your browser, locally | IMG AI image service | IMG AI image service | IMG AI image service |
| Cost | Free, no account needed | Credits per image | Credits per image | Credits per image |
| Best for | Study drawings, print reference, texture that must survive | Avatars, card art, a stylised portrait | Anime and manga looks | Colouring a line drawing you already have |
| Output | PNG at the photo’s original size | 1K, 2K, or 4K raster image | 1K, 2K, or 4K raster image | Raster image |
A line drawing records edges; a sketch records light. A line drawing of a face gives you the outline of the jaw and the shape of the eyes. A sketch also gives you the shadow under the brow, the lighter plane of the cheek, and the darker side of the nose — the continuous tone that makes the face read as a solid form. That is why fur and hair survive a sketch and disappear in a line drawing: they are texture and value, not edges.
A photo with a large, very dark area — a night scene, a black background in a portrait, a deep shadow filling the frame — contains a lot of low luminance, and the sketch draws that as heavy graphite, correctly. To open it up, raise Detail so the tone is broken into finer strokes and lower Darkness so the curve presses less. That usually recovers the picture. The other cause is a subject that genuinely fills the frame with shadow; crop to a lighter part of the photo, or lighten the source before sketching.
Detail controls the blur radius in the colour-dodge step, so higher values give finer, denser strokes and lower values give fewer, broader ones. Darkness controls the tone curve that turns lightness into graphite, so higher values deepen the shadows and press harder overall. Both start at 50. Changing either one only recomputes the drawing from the photo already in memory; nothing is re-uploaded or re-decoded.
Yes, and portraits are a good test of the difference between this tool and a filter. Because the drawing keeps the photograph’s own values, the eyebrows, the eyes, and the shadow under the nose stay where they are, so the face remains the same face. Keep Detail moderate so skin does not turn scratchy, and raise Darkness only as far as the hair needs. A sharp, evenly lit portrait gives the clearest result.
No. The photo is read by your browser, oriented, and drawn on a canvas in the page. No image is sent to IMG AI or to any other service, no generation request is made, and no credits are used. Because the work happens locally, the tool also works without an account, and the file never leaves your device.
The PNG is the same pixel dimensions as the photo you opened, so a 4000 × 3000 photo exports at 4000 × 3000. The on-screen preview is downsampled to keep the sliders responsive, but the preview and the export run the same settings and the same stroke scaling, so what you see is what you download. Photos above 40 megapixels are refused so the browser does not run out of memory.
Open a photo, set the stroke and the graphite, check it against the original, and download a PNG at the photo’s own size.
Open the sketch tool