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• Choosing Colours
• Shading or Contouring
• Edges (or Dithering)

My biggest complaint about these programs is that the colours they suggest often bear no resemblance to reality.  My first attempt at a  golden mask looked fine on the screen, but when I went to purchase the threads suggested I found they included several dusty roses and a pale green.  On the screen, these colours were light golds.

ASIDE: I STRONGLY suggest that you purchase one or more colour charts.  This will save you endless trips to your yarn/thread supplier and certainly make the designing process much easier.

In addition to this little problem, it appears that if you use the same program and photograph on two different computers, you will get two different charts with entirely different colour suggestions. 

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These programs are very good at shading (or contouring) a design.  Here is a photograph of an orchid that I've charted using PCStitch. This is the design produced by importing the photo using 30 colours. Next, I have removed the background. And finally, I have reduced the colours in the chart to only 7 colours - the black background, a few yellow highlights, a cream and four pinks.  With this few colours and a colour chart, it's very easy to choose your own colours.

So, these programs are also very good at charting in black and white.  Then you can use a family of colours to create an image like this easily recognized face.

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The second thing that these programs do poorly is produce a crisp edge.  Here is a portion of a design that I thought I would like to stitch.  The design itself has clear, crisp edges and uses only a couple of colours.  The chart was surprising.  The program blended the edges of the design from white through several grays to black.  In fact, the chart contained 30 colours !!! So what's going on here? 

During the importing process, the programs overlays the photo with a grid.  If you have asked for a pattern 100 by 100 stitches, it will overlay your photo with grid of 100 squares by 100 squares.  Then it looks at each of these  10,000 squares independently to determine how much red, green and blue it contains.  Then it refers to the palette of colors and chooses the closest match.  So, if the square contain some blue and some white, the match will be a lighter blue. How light will be determined by the amount of white in that particular square. Using this method, a pattern could contain an enormous number of blues while the photo contains only one. Most programs reduce the number of colors before creating the chart. 

It's important to remember that a program cannot think logically.  It just follows instructions.   Often the program instructions suggest matching the numbers of stitches to the number of pixels in the photo but this is not always possible. You can certainly edit the chart and in most cases will have to do so.