E InkPhoto Frames

See your photo on e-ink

Pick a photo and a frame and this tool dithers it to the six inks of an E Ink Spectra 6 screen, so you can see how it will look on the wall before you buy a frame or send the picture. Then download the result.

Updated

Choose a photo to start.

Your photo never leaves your device. It is read, resized and dithered in this browser tab; nothing is uploaded or stored.

An example, start to finish

A bright still life we rendered, before and after this converter’s own code with the starting settings. From a few feet away the colors hold up well: yellow, red and blue sit close to real inks, so they dither cleanly.

A still life photo: lemons in a white bowl, a cobalt jug, a red apple and a green pear on a pale tablecloth
The photo, a still life we rendered in Blender.
The same still life dithered to six inks: from a distance the colors hold, with a fine grain of colored dots
After the converter: 1600 × 1200 pixels, contrast 1.1, saturation 1.3, six pure inks.
Close-up of the dithered lemon at the front and its shadow: separate dots of yellow, white, red, green, blue and black
A 120 × 90 pixel patch of the lemon at the front and its shadow, enlarged. Every dot is one of the six inks; the most common here are yellow, white and red.
  • Black 6%
  • White 45%
  • Yellow 16%
  • Red 7%
  • Blue 19%
  • Green 7%

How much of each ink the converted still life uses. White is the biggest share at 45%, then blue at 19%: the pale cloth and the blue-gray wall.

What the converter does

  1. It crops and resizes your photo to the frame’s exact pixels (1600 × 1200 for most 13.3-inch frames), and turns the frame to portrait if your photo is portrait.
  2. It raises contrast and saturation a little (to 1.10 and 1.30 to start), because the inks print duller than a screen.
  3. It dithers the result with Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion. Each pixel takes the nearest of the six inks and hands its error to the neighbors to its right and below, so every area averages out to about the right shade.
  • Black
  • White
  • Yellow
  • Red
  • Blue
  • Green

Each chip above shows an ink twice: the pure color on top and the ink as it really looks below. The picture is dithered to the pure palette (black, white, yellow, red, blue and green at full strength), because that is what panel drivers expect. The “muted” preview then paints the same dots in the inks’ measured colors. Its white is really a light gray (161, 164, 165), so the preview looks darker than a real frame does once your eyes adjust to it on the wall. Both palettes come from Pimoroni’s open-source Spectra 6 driver (pimoroni/inky, inky_e673.py), and Waveshare recommends Floyd-Steinberg dithering for these panels (Waveshare manual).

How close is it to a real frame?

Close enough to tell a good photo from a bad one, not a perfect match. Frame makers tune their own dithering, and Aura says its version creates the look of millions of tones (MacRumors). A photo that turns muddy here rarely looks good on the wall, though. For what to pick, see which photos suit e-ink. Building your own frame? The downloaded PNG is ready for a DIY panel.