Stencil AI App Guide: Every Editor Tool Explained

The Stencil AI app turns a photo from your iPhone camera or library into a black-line stencil, then lets you refine it with four editor tools: Adjust, Transform, Ink and Touch Up. Your first stencil is free. This guide covers every control.

What is the Stencil AI app and what does it cost to start?

Stencil AI - Photo to Stencil is a free-to-download iPhone app in the App Store's Graphics & Design category, with an age rating of 4+. Its job is narrow: turn a photo into pure black outlines on white using an AI image model, then let you refine, save, print and share the result. The tagline in the app is "Turn photos into stencils." and that is the entire scope. Tattoo artists, apprentices and clients use it for reference-to-stencil work; crafters use it for pumpkin carving, spray paint, wood burning, walls, cookies and cutting machines. Downloading costs nothing and your first stencil is free, which the app calls "Your first stencil is on us": one credit, loaded when you install. There is no account to create. Version 2.0, the release this guide describes, shipped in August 2026.

How do you convert a photo into a stencil?

Conversion is one tap plus a short wait, and the result depends mostly on the photo. A single subject with clear edges and even light gives the model clean contours to follow; a busy background, heavy shadow or motion blur means more time in the editor afterwards.

Pick a photo. Take one with the camera or choose one from your library. Crop to the subject if you can; a tight photo converts better than a wide one.
Tap Convert to Stencil. Your first conversion is free.
Watch the five phases. The progress runs "Analyzing your photo", "Sketching the outlines", "Adding the details", "Refining the lines" and "Almost ready". Stay in the app until it finishes.
Compare on the slider. The result opens in an interactive before/after view. Drag the handle across, or press and hold, to see the photo and the stencil in the same place.
Choose what happens next. Edit it, save it to your camera roll, share it, or convert another. Whatever you choose, the stencil is already in your Collection.

A kitsune mask with cherry blossoms: the conversion keeps the mask outline and the blossom shapes as continuous lines and drops the shading.

What the slider is for

The comparison slider is a checking tool, not decoration. Drag it across the eyes, hands or lettering and look for three things: an outline that closed where the photo had a soft edge, a solid black the model kept because the design needed it, such as tiger stripes, and any detail it dropped that you want back. That tells you which tool to open first: Touch Up for a missing shape, Adjust for lines that are there but too thin.

How does the Collection work?

The Collection is a grid of every stencil you have generated; the app calls this your History. Nothing is lost between sessions, because generated stencils are stored on the device inside the app. Press and hold any stencil to mark it as a favourite, then switch the filter between Show all and Show favourites to find client work or a design you keep coming back to. From the Collection you can open a stencil in the editor, share it through the iOS share sheet, save it to your photo gallery, or delete it. Delete asks for confirmation before it removes anything, so a stray tap does not cost you a generation. Treat the Collection as your working folder: generate a few variations of a reference, favourite the one that works, and delete the rest once the job is done.

Which editor tool does what?

The Edit Stencil screen has four tools, and each one changes a different property of the stencil. Use them in a fixed order: Transform first, so you are not adjusting lines you will crop away; Adjust second, because it acts on the whole image; Touch Up third, for the individual lines the sliders cannot reach; and Ink last, because it only changes how the finished lines are rendered.

Tool	What it changes	Use it when
Adjust: Line Weight	Thickness of every line at once	Lines are too fine to trace or too heavy to read at the print size
Adjust: Darkness	How solid the black is	The print looks grey, or you want a faint guide to draw over
Adjust: Smoothing	Jitter and speckle along the lines	Fur, hair or fabric produced wobbly edges
Transform: Crop	The visible area, Free or Square	You want one element out of a wider photo
Transform: Rotate, Flip, Mirror	Orientation of the whole stencil	Printing sideways, or mirroring a tattoo stencil for transfer
Ink: line colour	Black, Blue, Red, Violet, White or Custom	Previewing on skin or dark surfaces, or colour-coding layers
Ink: Paper	White or Transparent background	Transparent gives a PNG with only the lines for other apps
Touch Up: Draw and Erase	Individual lines, added or removed	Closing a gap, removing texture, adding a bridge

Adjust: Line Weight, Darkness and Smoothing

Adjust is three sliders that act on the whole stencil, and it is where most stencils are finished. Line Weight thickens or thins every line together. Darkness controls how solid the black is. Smoothing evens out the small wobbles that photographic texture leaves along an edge. Work with the print size in mind: a stencil for a 4 cm finger tattoo and the same stencil for a 30 cm shoulder piece need different Line Weight settings, because the line that is right at one scale is wrong at the other. Move one slider at a time, then look at the thinnest part of the design, not the boldest. The line weight for tattoo stencils post covers how thick a line should be for thermal transfer; for crafts, the answer is "wider than your smallest blade or brush".

Line Weight

Push it up when lines look like hairlines on paper, when a thermal copier drops the fine parts, or when you plan to cut the stencil and need every opening wide enough for a blade. Pull it down when a print reads as a heavy black mass, when interior lines merge, or when you want a lighter guide to draw over freehand.

Darkness

Raise it when the print comes out grey or the lines look washed out on a light box; a cutting-machine trace also prefers solid black. Lower it when you want a faint, pencil-like guide under tracing paper, or when you are stacking a stencil with a drawing and need the guide to sit back.

Smoothing

Raise it for hair, fur, grass, fabric and anything with texture, because those produce jittery edges that print as fuzz and cut as a hundred tiny nodes. Keep it low for lettering, mechanical objects and faces, where a small bump may be a real feature and too much smoothing rounds off the corners you want to keep.

Transform: Crop, Rotate, Flip and Mirror

Transform handles everything about the frame rather than the lines. Crop has two modes, Free and Square: Free lets you box any region, Square locks the aspect ratio so a stencil prints and posts at a consistent shape. Rotate Left and Rotate Right turn the stencil in fixed steps, which is how you get a landscape reference to print upright on portrait paper. Flip and Mirror reverse the stencil on its two axes. Mirror carries an in-app tip that reads "tattoo stencils are usually mirrored before transfer", and the tip exists because the transfer step reverses the design, so a reversed print reads correctly on skin. If you are working on a tattoo, mirror before you print; if you are working on a craft stencil, leave it alone. The why tattoo stencils are mirrored post explains when the rule does and does not apply, including lettering and asymmetric designs. Crop before you Adjust, so you judge line weight on the part you will actually use.

Ink: line colour and paper

Ink changes how the finished lines are rendered without changing their shape. The line colour can be Black, Blue, Red, Violet, White or a Custom Color you pick yourself. Paper is either White or Transparent. The combination decides what you get when you save: black on white is the standard printable stencil, and anything on Transparent exports as a transparent PNG in which only the lines carry pixels. That PNG is the version to bring into a drawing app as a top layer, into Cricut Design Space for a trace with no background to remove, or over a photo of the surface to preview placement. Coloured lines have practical uses too: Violet or Blue over a photo of skin gives a rough preview of a transfer, White is the version to preview on a dark pumpkin or a black T-shirt, and Red or a custom colour tells two stencils apart in a multi-layer design. The Cricut stencil from a photo workflow starts with exactly this transparent export.

Touch Up: Draw, Erase and zoom

Touch Up is the manual pass. Draw adds black lines with a brush; Erase removes them with a white one. Brush Size sets the width of either, so you can drop it low to close a 1 mm gap in an outline and raise it to wipe a whole patch of unwanted texture. Undo and Redo step through your strokes, and Clear resets the pass so you can start again. The tip on screen reads "Draw with one finger. Pinch with two to zoom." and that is the technique: pinch in with two fingers until the area you are fixing fills the screen, draw with one finger, then pinch out to check the whole stencil. Typical jobs are closing an outline the model left open, erasing eyelashes and fur texture, thickening one line without touching the rest, and adding a bridge across an island for a cut stencil. Always zoom before you draw.

Manga eyes close-up: the kind of result where Touch Up earns its place, closing a lash line or removing a stray highlight the model kept.

A Touch Up routine that works

Erase first, draw second. Removing the clutter shows you where the real gaps are. Use Undo freely; it is faster than an Erase pass over a Draw mistake.

Every conversion auto-saves to the Collection, so "saving" in this app means getting the stencil out. Save to camera roll writes the finished stencil, with your Ink and Paper choices applied, into the Photos app. Share opens the iOS share sheet, which is how you send it to a client, drop it into a drawing app or print it. Print from the share sheet or from Photos, and print at the real size the design needs; a stencil printed at "fit to page" is the wrong size for almost everything. The tattoo stencil size guide covers measuring the placement, and the print a stencil at home post covers getting the printer to respect that size. For carving and craft use, the pumpkin carving stencil page shows the same workflow through to taping the print onto the pumpkin.

How do purchases and restoring work?

Your first conversion is free, so you can judge the output on your own photo before paying anything. Further conversions are in-app purchases, and the current options are always shown inside the app rather than on this site, because the App Store sets what you see for your region. Editing an existing stencil never costs anything: Adjust, Transform, Ink and Touch Up, saving to the camera roll, sharing and printing all work on stencils already in your Collection. The same goes for browsing, favouriting and deleting from the Collection. If a conversion fails, it should not count against you; email support with your User ID if you think one did.

Restore Purchases

Subscriptions and packs are managed through Apple. If you reinstall the app or move to a new iPhone, open Settings inside the app and tap Restore Purchases to bring your plan back. To cancel or change a subscription, use the subscription settings on your Apple account.

Free generations for a video

Post a video of something you made with Stencil AI on TikTok or Instagram, tag the app, then email the link and your User ID, which is shown in Settings, to support. After verification, free generations are unlocked in your app. The details are on the free generations page, and the support page has the contact address.

Which iPhones and languages are supported?

Stencil AI is an iPhone app and only an iPhone app. There is no iPad-specific layout, no Android version and no web app, so if your workflow lives on a desktop or an Android phone, this is not the tool for it. It requires iOS 26.2 or later, and it runs in portrait. The interface is localised in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, following your iPhone's language setting. The best stencil maker apps for iPhone post sets out the trade-offs against Photoshop, Procreate, GIMP, Inkscape and cutting-machine software, and the tattoo stencil maker page shows the tattoo workflow from photo to transfer-ready print.

What happens to your photo?

When you tap Convert to Stencil, the photo is uploaded over an authenticated cloud function for the single purpose of generating the stencil; that upload is how the AI model processes it. The generated stencils are stored on your device in the app's Collection. No account is required, so there is no profile attached to your work. The privacy policy has the full detail, and if a question is not answered there, ask through support.