Pattern Scan Cleaner
Clean Up a Scanned Embroidery Pattern
Drop the paper background. Keep the lines. Pick their color.
Turn a gray, shadowy scan or photo of a pattern into crisp lines on a clean white page — in black, water-erasable pen blue, or any color you like. Your file never leaves your device.
Stays on your device
The file is read in your browser. There is no upload and no server.
Cleans up the scan
Paper texture, gray tint, and page-edge shadows disappear; only the drawn lines stay.
Lines in your color
Print in pale blue so transfer lines hide under your stitches, or any color you choose.
Tip: slide line pickup right to catch faint pencil lines, left if specks of paper texture are sneaking through. The preview updates as you drag.
How it works
Book and magazine patterns are usually printed on toned paper, and scans pick up shadows and texture that waste ink and muddy your transfer. This tool compares every pixel of your scan to the paper around it, keeps only the marks that are genuinely darker than their surroundings, and redraws them on pure white. Because the comparison is local, it removes uneven lighting and page-curl shadows that a simple brightness threshold cannot.
Printing the lines in pale blue is a favorite embroidery trick: trace or transfer as usual, and the lines are light enough to disappear under your stitching — no washing out required. Everything happens in your browser: your scan is never uploaded anywhere.
Please use it with patterns you have the right to copy for personal use — your own drawings, patterns from books you own, or free patterns.
Common questions
Is my scan uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read and redrawn by your own browser, and there is no server behind this page to send it to. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored — you can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool still works.
Why print the lines in light blue?
Pale lines are much easier to hide under stitches than black ones, whether you trace the printout onto fabric over a lightbox or print onto a printable fabric sheet. One caveat: printer ink is not water-erasable. If you need the marks to disappear afterwards rather than be covered, use the printout as a tracing guide and mark the fabric with a water-erasable pen.
The lines came out faint or broken. What do I change?
Drag the line pickup slider to the right. That tells the tool to keep marks that are only slightly darker than the paper around them, which is what catches faint pencil and worn book printing.
There are specks of paper texture all over the page.
Drag the line pickup slider to the left. The tool then keeps only the marks that are clearly darker than the surrounding paper, and the texture drops away with them.
Can I use a phone photo instead of a scanner?
Yes. The tool judges each pixel against the paper immediately around it rather than against one brightness for the whole page, so uneven lighting and the shadow near a book gutter still flatten out. Lay the page as flat as you can and keep your own shadow off it.
What files can I open, and what do I get back?
You can open a PDF — every page is processed — or a PNG, JPEG, or WebP image. You get back a multi-page PDF at the original page size, or a PNG per page, with an option for a transparent background instead of white.
Can I use this on patterns from a book I own?
Cleaning up a scan of a pattern you own for your own stitching is ordinary personal use. Please do not use it to redistribute someone else’s pattern.