The complete guide to making stickers online

Last updated: 2026-08-05

1. What makes a good sticker

A sticker has to read instantly at about 120 pixels on screen. That single constraint drives every other decision:

• One clear subject. A face, a pet, an object. Crowded scenes turn to mush when scaled down.
• High contrast against the background. This makes the automatic cut-out far more accurate.
• A visible border. The white die-cut edge is not decoration — it separates the sticker from whatever chat bubble sits behind it.
• Big, short text. Two or three words maximum, with a contrasting stroke.

If you are photographing something specifically to turn into a sticker, shoot it against a plain wall or a sheet of paper in even light. Ten seconds of setup saves several minutes of manual erasing.

2. Getting a clean cut-out

Open the Cut out tab. The background is removed automatically when the image loads, and in most cases that is already enough. When it is not, work through these controls in order:

Colour tolerance

This is the single most important slider. It controls how far a pixel's colour may drift from the sampled background before it is kept. Raise it if patches of background survive; lower it if parts of your subject disappear. Around 30 works for most photos.

Edge trim

JPEG compression smears colour across hard edges, leaving a thin coloured halo after cutting. Set edge trim to 1 or 2 pixels to shave that fringe off. Do not go higher than necessary — it eats real detail such as hair and whiskers.

Smoothing

Softens the alpha edge so the cut-out does not look like it was made with scissors. One pass is usually right; three or four gives a deliberately soft, painterly edge.

Manual brushes

For everything the algorithm cannot guess, use Erase to remove leftovers and Restore to paint detail back. Both brushes are soft-edged and pressure-independent, so short strokes work better than one long drag. Press [ and ] to resize, and Ctrl+Z to undo.

3. Choosing the outline

The classic sticker look is a solid white border of roughly 4–6% of the sticker's width. In this editor that is a thickness of about 14–20 at a 512 px export.

• White — the default. Works on any chat background, light or dark.
• White plus a thin dark second outline — the "Bold" preset. Best legibility on light backgrounds.
• Coloured outline — pick a colour already present in the subject for a cohesive look.
• No outline — only sensible when the subject already has a strong dark silhouette.

The outline here is generated from an exact euclidean distance field, which means the border keeps a constant width all the way around and corners stay sharp instead of rounding off the way blur-based outlines do.

4. WhatsApp stickers

WhatsApp is strict about its format. Static stickers must be:

• 512×512 pixels, exactly
• PNG or WebP with a transparent background
• under 100 KB per sticker
• ideally with a small transparent margin so nothing touches the edge

Choose the WhatsApp preset in the Export tab. It selects 512×512 WebP and automatically steps the quality down until the file fits the 100 KB budget. Keep padding at 6% or more so the sticker is not clipped in the picker.

WhatsApp itself cannot import loose image files, so use a third-party sticker-maker app on Android or iOS to assemble the pack — those apps accept exactly the PNG or WebP files this tool produces.

5. Telegram sticker packs

Telegram is the easiest platform to publish to, and it is done entirely in chat:

1. Export your stickers as 512×512 PNG with transparency. At least one side must be exactly 512 px.
2. Open a chat with @Stickers in Telegram.
3. Send /newpack and give the pack a name.
4. Send each PNG as a file (not as a compressed photo), followed by an emoji for each one.
5. Send /publish and choose a short link name.

Use the Add to pack button to queue several stickers, then download them all at once as a ZIP — much faster than exporting one at a time.

6. Discord emoji and stickers

Discord custom emoji are capped at 256 KB and are displayed very small, so simplify aggressively: crop tight to the subject, drop fine detail, and skip captions entirely. Use the 256 or 320 px presets. Server stickers allow 320×320 PNG at up to 512 KB.

7. Printing real vinyl stickers

For physical stickers, export at 2048 px PNG. That gives roughly 300 DPI at 17 cm, which covers laptop and water-bottle sizes comfortably.

• Keep the white border thick. Cutting machines need material to cut through; a thin border risks the blade clipping your artwork.
• Add padding. Set padding to 10% or more so the cut line never touches the design.
• Turn the drop shadow off. A shadow prints as grey haze on the vinyl. It is a screen effect only.
• Check your colours. Bright neon RGB colours cannot be reproduced in CMYK printing and will come out duller.

8. Troubleshooting

The background did not come off

The automatic pass samples colours from the image border. If your subject touches the edge of the frame, or the background is a photograph rather than a flat colour, that heuristic fails. Use the magic wand to click each background region directly, then clean up with the eraser.

There is a coloured halo around the subject

Raise Edge trim to 1–2 px. This is almost always JPEG fringing.

Hair and fur look chewed up

Lower the tolerance, set smoothing to 0, then restore the lost strands manually with the Restore brush at a small size.

The file is over 100 KB

Switch the format to WebP, which typically halves the size at the same visual quality. Reducing the number of distinct colours in the image also helps.

It is slow on a big image

Images are capped at 1400 px internally for editing, but a very large source still takes a moment to decode. Export quality is unaffected — the final render is scaled from the full composition.