PBNify is a free browser tool that turns a photograph into a paint by numbers template. It works, it costs nothing, and for a simple image it takes about five minutes. It also stops well short of giving you something you can paint, and that gap is the thing worth understanding before you start. If it stops short of what you need, the alternatives are worth knowing before you pay for anything.
To be straightforward about it: this is Ledgebay's blog and we sell custom paint by numbers made from photographs, so PBNify does a free version of something we charge for. We have tried to be fair about what it does well. We are not affiliated with it in any way.
What PBNify is
A tool built by Daniel Munro and published with the source code freely available and nothing but a donate button attached. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded to a server, which is a genuine privacy advantage if you are working with family photographs.
You give it an image, tell it which colors to use by clicking on them, and it returns two things: an outlined template with numbers, and a filled preview of how the finished result should look.
How to use it
- Pick the right photograph. This decides everything. Good contrast, clear shapes, decent resolution. Soft focus, low light and busy backgrounds all convert badly, because the tool needs distinct edges between areas of color to find.
- Choose the palette. Click on the parts of the image whose colors you want in the final palette — the highlights, the mid-tones, the shadows. Fewer colors gives a flatter, more graphic result; more gives subtler shading and a great many small sections. Somewhere between twelve and twenty is a reasonable starting point.
- Set the output size. Under Options. Larger output means larger printed sections, which matters a lot when you come to paint it — small sections on a home printout are genuinely hard to work with.
- Process it, then use the Outline and Filled buttons to check the result. Expect to go back and adjust the palette. The first attempt is rarely the one you keep.
- Save both files. The outline is what you paint on. The color key is what tells you which paint goes where, and without it the numbers mean nothing. Save the filled preview too, as a reference for what you are aiming at.
Where it stops
This is the honest part, and it is not a criticism of the tool — it is simply the boundary of what a converter can do. PBNify gives you files. Turning files into a painting is a separate job.
- You need something to paint on. A home printer prints on paper, and paper buckles and cockles under acrylic. For anything you intend to keep, the template has to be printed onto canvas or transferred to one.
- You need paint that matches the key. The palette is sampled from your photograph, so the colors are whatever was in the picture. Matching those to paints you can buy is a mixing exercise, and hitting a specific mid-tone by eye is harder than it sounds.
- The numbers land small. On a home printout the printed numbers are often near the limit of what is comfortable to read, and the tool has no way of knowing that.
- No support and occasional failures. Conversions sometimes do not run, and the usual fix is a different browser or device. There is nobody to ask when that happens.
- Fine detail gets flattened. Intricate images lose the detail that made them worth painting. Faces are the hardest case.
Who it suits
Use PBNify if you want to experiment, you are curious how your photograph converts, you enjoy the mixing and printing side of it, or the photo is not one you are precious about. It costs nothing and you will learn quickly whether your image is the kind that works.
Have it made instead if the photograph actually matters — a house, a person, a dog that is gone. The free route is often a false economy there: an evening on the conversion, another on printing and mixing, and a result limited by your printer.
Our custom kits take the photograph, convert it, and print it on canvas with a numbered paint set matched to that specific image, an 11x17 reference print, and brushes. You can see what people have said about them or browse the customer gallery for finished ones.
There is also a wider comparison of the converters in our guide to paint by numbers software, including the paid desktop options, and a guide to choosing a photo that will convert well — which makes more difference to the result than any software choice.
Why people paint from their own photographs
Worth saying, because it is the reason this tool exists at all. A stock landscape is a pleasant evening. A painting of your grandmother's kitchen, or the dog, or the house you grew up in, is a different thing entirely — both to make and to give.
Painting also has a well-documented calming effect, and the mechanism is not mysterious. Freehand painting carries constant decisions: what to draw, what to mix, whether it is working. Numbering removes those, so the absorbed, unhurried part arrives much sooner. That is the appeal, and it holds whether the template came from a free tool or a printed kit.
In short
PBNify is a good, free tool that does exactly what it says and nothing beyond it. Try it — it costs five minutes. Just go in knowing that the template is the start of the job rather than the end of it.
If you would rather skip that part, you can upload a photo and see the sizes here, or browse the licensed designs in the shop.
