Choose the right photo, convert it to a mesh, verify the geometry, set up the slice and print something that actually looks like the picture.
Convert an image to STLHere is how to turn a photo into a 3D print, plus the handful of things worth having ready before the first slice.
The order matters: the mesh has to be right before the slicer touches it.
A face, a pet or a building reads well as a shallow relief because the shapes are already distinct. A busy landscape needs more depth to survive as a print. Crop to the final proportions, then fix exposure so the lightest and darkest tones you care about are present in the file.
Run the conversion in the browser window and download the mesh. Brightness maps to height: light areas rise, dark areas sink, and inverting the image flips that. This is the only step where the photo itself matters. Everything after it is about the geometry.
Load the STL and look at it before you slice. Check the bounding box in millimetres against the size you wanted, confirm there is a solid base rather than a sheet a few tenths of a millimetre thick, and look for stray shells floating beside the main body. A mesh with holes or flipped normals slices into nonsense.
Photo reliefs are thin walls, not mechanical parts. A lithophane printed upright wants 0.08 to 0.12 mm layers, two or three perimeters, 100 per cent infill and no supports. A relief lying flat on the bed is more forgiving: 0.12 to 0.2 mm layers, around 15 per cent infill, and a brim if the base is thin.
Watch the base go down. If the back plate is around 1 mm and the first layer is squashed or gappy, correct the Z offset before the print climbs, because a warped base lifts everything above it. When it finishes, check the highest points of the height map for blobs and stringing.
These three account for most of the filament people throw away on photo prints.
A height map surface on its own is a few tenths of a millimetre thick and will tear when you lift it off the bed. Add a base of at least 0.8 mm, and 1.5 to 2 mm if the print will be handled or hung. Setting the base in the converter is cheaper than printing the same model twice.
STL files carry no units. A model that imports at 4 mm or 400 mm tall is usually a unit mismatch rather than a broken file, and dragging the resize handles makes it worse. Type the target size, check the bounding box, and confirm the wall thickness is still printable at that scale.
Faces, fur and lettering are where supports fuse hardest and where removing them does the most visible damage. Rotate the relief so the tallest geometry points up or lies flat on the bed, use a brim for adhesion instead of supports, and let the part cool before you pull it free.
Small changes to the photo and the print profile that show up clearly on the finished part.
Use the photo you just cropped. Set the size, the depth of the relief and the base thickness, then download the STL and take it straight into your slicer. A basic conversion is free in the browser, needs no account, and your upload is cleared from the cache afterwards.
Yes. A photo's brightness values can be read as height, so a greyscale image becomes a surface you can save as STL. Colour and texture are not stored, because STL holds geometry only.
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