What a Pacyra paint by numbers guide contains
Four things, and all of them come out of the same picture. A drawing of closed outlines, a number inside every one of them, a legend mapping each number to a colour, and a coloured version of the same guide to check yourself against.
The outlines are the shapes the photograph actually has. A fold in a sleeve or a branch across leaves becomes a shape of its own instead of disappearing into a larger one, which is what makes a printed page look drawn rather than pixelated. That matters when you come to trace it, because the line you follow and the area you fill are the same line.
Nothing arrives too small to number. Pacyra checks every shape against the physical size you said you were working at, and a region with no room for a legible label is merged into its neighbour rather than printed as a dot with a 34 in it.
How to turn a photo into paint by numbers
Open the studio, choose a photograph from your device and pick a mode. Contour Painting follows the subject and gives you shapes that belong to the picture. Shape Colouring lays a repeating tiling of squares, hexagons or triangles over it instead, which is steadier to paint and reads as a worksheet.
Then set the two things that decide almost everything about the result. Detail controls how much ends up on the page, and the colour count sets a ceiling on the palette. That ceiling is a limit rather than a quota, so asking for forty colours never leaves you mixing two you could not tell apart. Set the canvas or paper size before you export, because that is what the readability check measures against.
- Choose a JPEG, PNG or WebP from your own device.
- Pick Contour Painting for a drawing, or Shape Colouring for a worksheet.
- Set detail, colour count and the real size you will paint at.
- Export as PDF, SVG or PNG, or project it straight onto a canvas.
A palette you can actually mix
Every shape carrying the same final colour gets the same number, and the legend names each one. Two colours a painter could not tell apart on the palette never arrive as two separate numbers, so a larger palette buys range rather than more mixing.
The same photograph at the same settings always produces the same palette. That reads like a small thing until you print a guide, lose it, and need the second copy to match the paint you already mixed.
Why the photograph never gets uploaded
There is no endpoint that accepts a photograph. Decoding, cropping, colour analysis, segmentation and export all run in browser memory on your own machine, so the file, its name and its location data have nowhere to go.
This is worth being exact about, because several tools describe local processing and mean something looser by it. Pacyra has one exception and it is not a photograph. If you order a printed canvas, the browser uploads the two files it drew for that order, the print image and the guide, after you have added the canvas to your cart. The source photograph is no part of either file and is never sent.
What it costs
The studio is free and every feature is included, with five photo credits arriving each Monday. One credit unlocks one photograph, and everything you make from that photograph afterwards is covered by the same unlock, in every export format.
Credit packs exist for the weeks when five is not enough. They are one-off purchases starting at 2.99 euro excluding VAT, they never renew, and the credits stay valid for a year.
What this will not do for you
It will not turn a difficult photograph into an easy painting. Pictures with clear shapes and real contrast reduce well. A soft gradient sky, a very dark interior or a busy background full of small detail produces a guide that is technically correct and unpleasant to paint, and no setting rescues that.
It will not paint for you either. The guide is a plan for the first decisions, which are the ones hardest to undo. Everything after that is still yours.