How to turn a photo into a colouring page

A good colouring page is mostly about outlines: clear, closed shapes on a white background, with no grey shading for little hands to fight against. Every method below is a different way of getting from a photo, which is full of soft tones and shadows, to those clean outlines.

What makes a photo work as a colouring page

Before you choose a method, it helps to know what you are aiming for. The lines need to join up, so there is an obvious area to fill, and there should be no shading at all: grey tones and cross-hatching look clever but leave nowhere to colour.

Size matters too. Young children, especially under-sevens, do best with big shapes, such as faces, bodies and a few large objects behind them, because tiny details are frustrating to colour. Keep the background simple, with one or two recognisable things (a tree, a sofa, the sea) rather than every leaf and brick. And for a family page, the face is the whole point, so the eyes, mouth and outline of the hair matter more than anything else.

Start with a sharp, well-lit photo where the people are large in the frame. Our guide to choosing the best photos goes into detail, but the short version is that close-ups in daylight beat distant group shots every time.

Method 1: Trace it by hand

Tracing is the oldest method, and still the one that gives you the most control. It costs almost nothing and is a lovely job to do with an older child.

You will need the photo printed at the size you want your page (A4 is easiest), plain paper, a pencil, a black fine-liner or felt pen, and a light source such as a window or a light box.

1. Print the photo at full page size, with the brightness turned up a little so the edges are easy to see.
2. Tape the photo to a bright window and tape a sheet of plain paper over it. A light box, or a tablet showing a white screen, also works.
3. Trace the main outlines in pencil first: each person’s outline, their hair, eyes, mouth and clothes, and one or two background objects. Ignore shadows and textures.
4. Simplify as you go. If a shape is fiddly, like a hand or a patterned jumper, draw a simpler version. Nobody minds.
5. Go over the lines in black pen, a little thicker than you think they need to be, and rub out the pencil once the ink is dry.
6. Scan or photocopy the finished drawing if you want several copies.

Tracing is ideal for one or two special pages, and for anyone who enjoys drawing. The catch is time: allow twenty minutes or more per page, and faces are hard to get right if you aren’t used to drawing.

Method 2: Use a photo editor’s filters

Most photo-editing software can produce a rough line drawing automatically. Desktop editors, including the free GIMP, have an edge-detect filter and a threshold tool, and many phone apps have a “sketch” or “pencil” effect.

A typical approach looks like this:

1. Convert the photo to black and white and increase the contrast.
2. Run an edge-detect or sketch filter, which finds the places where the photo changes from light to dark.
3. Invert the image if needed, so you get dark lines on a white background.
4. Apply a threshold so every pixel becomes either pure black or pure white. This gets rid of the grey mush that makes filtered images hard to colour.
5. Tidy up by hand: erase stray specks and background clutter, and darken lines that have broken up.

Filters are quick, and they work best on photos with strong contrast and a plain background. Their weakness is that they can’t tell an important line, like the edge of a face, from an unimportant one, like a shadow or a pattern. Results are often busy, broken or blotchy, and faces can lose their features entirely, so expect to spend some time tidying.

Method 3: Use an AI line-art tool

Image tools that use AI can now redraw a photo as clean line art. Because they try to work out what is in the picture, rather than just finding light and dark edges, the results are usually much tidier than filters, with smooth outlines and simplified backgrounds.

They aren’t perfect, though. Faces can look slightly off, especially babies and small children. Hands and fingers sometimes come out oddly, pets’ fur and markings are hard to turn into outlines, and the tool may add a background object that wasn’t there or leave out one that was. If you try one, generate a few versions, pick the best and check every page closely before printing.

Read the terms before you upload family photos. You want clear answers to four questions: will my photos be used to train the tool, how long are they kept, can I delete them, and where are they stored? If you can’t find those answers, choose a different tool. Our guide to keeping children’s photos safe online has a fuller checklist.

Method 4: Use a personalised colouring book service

If you want a whole book rather than a page or two, a service will do the conversion, layout and printing for you. The better ones also check the pages and show you a preview first, which removes the main weakness of doing it yourself with AI: not knowing whether every page will come out well.

When you compare services, check whether you can see every page before you pay, what paper the book is printed on, whether a person checks the pages, what happens to your photos afterwards, and the total price including delivery. Our personalised colouring book buying guide goes through each of these.

That is what we do at Colour Your Family. You upload up to 20 photos and see a free preview of every page. A member of our team then checks every page before we print it on one side of 150gsm paper and post it to you. Our page on custom colouring pages shows the two line styles.

Which method should you choose?

Printing your own pages at home

If you make your own pages, a few printing choices make a big difference.

Use heavier paper if your printer accepts it. Ordinary printer paper is thin, so felt tips can soak through and pencils can tear it; your printer’s manual will tell you the heaviest paper it takes. Print in black only, at the highest quality setting, so the lines come out solid rather than speckled, and print on one side of the sheet, so any felt tip that bleeds through only reaches the back of the same page. Finally, leave a margin. Most home printers can’t print right to the edge, so keep the important parts of the drawing away from the border.

A few final tips

Do the faces first. If a face doesn’t look like the person, the page won’t feel personal, however good the rest of it is. Be ruthless with backgrounds, because a child would rather colour one big tree than fifty small leaves. Make the lines thicker for younger children, who find bold outlines easier to colour inside. And keep the original photo nearby, so children can match real hair, eye and clothing colours if they want to.

Whichever method you choose, the reward is the same: a child spotting themselves, their brother or their dog on the page and reaching for the pencils.