Number of Colours

The number of colours used in a photo saved as a .jpg file can be up to 16 million.

Not only are there only 500 colours (in the DMC stranded cotton range) but there is no way you would want to stitch something with that many coloured threads!

However, the more colours that can be used in the design the clearer the detail that is replicated in the chart. You can see the difference in the images below:

Using 100 colours	Using 30 colours

Here at DoodleCraft Design we start off importing the photo with a large number of colours and then, using our knowledge of colour and shape, we slowly merge similar colours until we have a design which still represents the original image but uses a lower number of colours. If you feel that our recommended number of colours is still too high we can continue to decrease the number but cannot guarantee the amount of detail in the finished design.