To turn a photo into a coloring page, the photo has to lose almost everything a photo has: color, shading, texture and background. What's left is thick black outlines around shapes that are white inside, so a crayon can fill each one. Toybox AI's Smart Editor, a Pro plan tool, redraws a photo that way when you type what you want. Here you'll find prompts by age, a worked example from one photo, letter-size print settings, and a free method in GIMP that uses no AI.
Coloring pages worth making from photos
A coloring page from a real photo works because the child already knows what's in it. Pages that work well for parents, teachers and party hosts:
- The family pet. A dog, cat or rabbit photographed from the side gives a clear outline with ears, tail and paws.
- A birthday party coloring table. The guest of honor, their pet or their favorite toy on a stack of pages, with crayons in the middle of the table.
- Grandparents and cousins. A page of each relative for a child to color and mail back, which works well for families who live far apart.
- A vacation coloring book. Six pages from one trip, such as the beach, the cabin and the ferry, stapled into a booklet for the drive home.
- Classroom pages. The class pet, the school building or a field trip stop. The guide to AI tools for teachers covers other classroom uses.
- Detailed line art for adults. A garden, a city street or a house with fine outlines and more shapes to fill.
A coloring page is different from a sketch: it has closed outlines and no shading. If you want pencil shading or charcoal instead, see the photo to sketch page.
Coloring page prompts by age
Paste a prompt into Smart Editor's "What should change?" box. All five ask for white fill and no shading, because gray patches are what spoil a printed page for crayons.
Toddlers (ages 2 to 4)
Turn this photo into a simple coloring page for a toddler: very thick black outlines, fewer than 15 large shapes, white inside every shape, no shading, no gray and no background. Keep the dog's floppy ears, round nose and wagging tail so it still looks like him.Kids (ages 5 to 8)
To turn a photo into a kids coloring page with a little more to do, keep a simple background and add a few details.
Turn this photo into a coloring page for a six-year-old. Use bold black outlines of even thickness, white inside every shape and no shading. Keep the girl, her bike and the tree behind her, and simplify the grass and the fence into a few large shapes. No text.Older kids and adults
To turn a photo into line art for grown-ups, ask for medium lines and many small closed shapes.
Turn this photo of the garden into detailed black and white line art for an adult coloring book. Clean black outlines of medium thickness, every flower, leaf and stone drawn as a closed shape, white fill everywhere, no shading and no gray. Keep the bench, the arch and the path in the same places.Family photo as one page
Turn this family photo into a coloring page with bold black outlines and white fill, no shading. Keep all five people in the same positions, with simple faces, their hairstyles and the shapes of their clothes. Replace the background with plain white except for a simple outline of the lake and two trees.Outline only, for tracing or crafts
When you just want to turn a photo into an outline drawing, ask for the shape and almost nothing inside it.
Turn this photo into a black and white outline drawing: one clean black line around the cat and the chair, a few inner lines for the eyes, ears and paws, and nothing else. Pure white background.A worked example: one photo to one page
Say the photo is a golden retriever lying on a lawn, taken at eye level on a sunny afternoon. Before you run it, crop the photo so the dog fills most of the frame and the lawn edge is gone. Then run the kids prompt with "the dog" in place of "the girl, her bike and the tree".
When the page comes back, check it the way a child will use it:
- Every shape is closed. A gap in the outline of the ear means the color spills out. Ask for "close every outline" if you see gaps.
- There's no gray. Shadows under the dog can come back as gray fill. Type "remove all gray and shading, pure white inside every shape".
- The shapes are big enough for crayons. Fur drawn as dozens of tiny strands is too fiddly for a young child. Ask for "fur as a few large shapes".
- It still looks like your dog. The ears, the nose and the tail are what a child checks first.
Each follow-up goes in the same box with "Latest result" selected, one change at a time.
Print a coloring page at letter size
For a sharp letter-size coloring page, choose 4K and the Social 4:5 shape, and print the image at 8 x 10 inches with a margin around it. Print shop 4OVER4 recommends 300 DPI for cards and flyers, and at that density a full 8.5 x 11 inch page would need 2550 x 3300 pixels. These are Smart Editor's sizes for an 8 x 10 inch print:
| Setting | File size (px) | Printed at 8 x 10 in | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social 4:5, 4K | 2560 x 3200 | 320 pixels per inch | Crisp lines; fills a letter page with a 1/4 inch margin at the sides |
| Social 4:5, HD | 1024 x 1280 | 128 pixels per inch | Usable for crayons, but thin lines can look soft |
| Original, from an upright phone photo | Follows your photo's shape (3:4 for a typical phone photo) | Close to letter proportions | Keeps your photo's proportions |
Mpix, a photo lab, lists 2000 x 2500 pixels as optimal for an 8 x 10 inch print, so 4K clears it and HD doesn't. When you print, pick the option that scales the image to fit the paper, and choose black and white instead of color. The download is a PNG, which you can print from your computer's or phone's photo app.
Free ways to turn a photo into a coloring page
You can turn a photo into a black and white outline for free in GIMP, the open-source image editor. It traces edges in your photo, so it works best on photos with a plain background.
- Open the photo and run Filters, then Edge-Detect, then Difference of Gaussians, with "Radius 2" set below "Radius 1", the setting GIMP's manual suggests for a sketch-like result.
- If the lines come out light on a dark background, choose Colors, then Invert, which turns the image into its negative.
- Choose Colors, then Threshold, and drag the slider until the lines are solid black and everything else is white. GIMP notes that Threshold drops the photo's anti-aliasing, so curved lines lose their smooth edges.
- Paint over stray specks with a white brush and export the page.
For an AI version with no Google AI plan, under Google's caps on free use, upload the photo to the Gemini app and ask for line art with bold outlines and white fill, using any prompt on this page. Google limits image editing to signed-in users 18 and over, so a parent runs it, not the child.
Tips for photos that make good coloring pages
Shoot one subject against a plain background. A pet on a bare floor or a kid against a wall gives clean outlines. A crowded living room gives a page full of tiny shapes.
Get the whole subject in the frame. Cut-off ears, feet or tails make a page that looks unfinished.
Say the age. Put "for a toddler" or "for an adult coloring book" in the prompt, so the line thickness and the number of shapes suit whoever is coloring.
Leave text out. Names and captions can come back misspelled. Write the child's name on the page with a marker instead.
Upload a JPG or PNG. iPhone 7 and later can save photos in the HEIF format, which Smart Editor doesn't accept. To make new photos save as JPEG, go to Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and tap "Most Compatible".
What an AI coloring page can't do
It may leave shading behind. Some results keep soft gray shadows. Ask again for "pure black lines on white, no gray", or switch "Editing" to "Original photo" and run the prompt with that sentence added.
Faces in group photos get simple. Five people in one small photo each end up with only a few lines for a face, and they may not look like themselves. For a page of one relative, crop the photo to that person first.
Pets and people can change a little. Smart Editor redraws the whole image each time and can't mask off a face. Check the features a child will recognize, like a pet's ears or grandpa's glasses.
How to turn a photo into a coloring page in Smart Editor
- Crop to one subject. The file can be a JPG or PNG of 10 MB at most.
- Sign in on a Pro plan, open Smart Editor and upload the cropped photo to "Your image".
- Paste the prompt for the right age into "What should change?".
- In "More options", pick 4K under "Quality" and "Social" under "Shape" for a letter-size page.
- Tap "Apply edit" and run the four checks from the worked example.
- Download the PNG and print one test copy before you print for the whole party or class.
The pricing page lists current plans and credit top-ups. To go the other way, turning a child's finished drawing into something that looks real, see kids' drawings to real life.