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Sketch to Figure: photograph a hand drawing, get a journal figure

Sketch to figure takes a phone photo of your whiteboard or notebook sketch and the AI workbench below redraws it into a clean, journal-quality scientific figure — straightening crooked boxes, aligning ambiguous arrows, and transcribing your handwriting into crisp type. Your original layout and intent are preserved, and every element of the scientific figure stays editable on the vector canvas. It is a natural fit for whiteboard biology figures, physics figures, and robotics diagrams.

Upload a sketchSee examples

†Snap your whiteboard or notebook sketch below and watch sketch to figure redraw it

Sketch to figure result: a polished publication-quality scientific figure of the MAPK signaling cascade redrawn from a hand-drawn notebook sketch
Sketch to figure before and after: a torn sketchbook page with a rough pencil drawing transformed into a crisp publication-grade scientific figure

MAPK signaling cascade · sketch to figure from a notebook sketch

Whiteboard & notebook
Handwriting to clean typeJournal-quality output
Live workbench

Sketch to figure: redraw your sketch into a clean scientific figure

Upload a photo of your hand-drawn sketch — a whiteboard pathway or a notebook workflow — then hit generate to run sketch to figure. The example instruction below is ready to use, or edit it to match your drawing.

Image → Figure
245/2000

Describe the figure you need — or add a reference image to transform.

Advanced
Cost 4 credits·Remaining 0 credits

Your figure will appear here

Pick a mode · Describe the figure · Generate

How it works

Sketch to figure in three steps, from photo to scientific figure

No tracing and no redrawing by hand — photograph what you already sketched and let sketch to figure do the cleanup.

1Step 1

Snap a photo of your sketch

Point your phone at the whiteboard or lab notebook and shoot — no scanner needed. LabFig reads the boxes, arrows, and scribbled labels even when the lines wobble and the handwriting runs together.

2Step 2

Generate a clean scientific figure

Sketch to figure redraws the photo as a journal-grade scientific figure: it straightens the geometry, transcribes your handwriting into crisp type, and snaps every block and connector to a consistent grid — while keeping the structure you actually drew.

3Step 3

Refine the details and export

Nudge any box, rename a transcribed label, or recolor a panel if the read of your sketch needs a tweak, then save the scientific figure as SVG, PDF, or 300-dpi PNG for your manuscript.

What sketch to figure handles

Sketch to figure is built for the messy reality of real sketches — captured on a phone, scribbled in a notebook, drawn in a hurry on a whiteboard.

Shoot a whiteboard pathway after a meeting or a workflow doodled in your lab notebook, and LabFig redraws the photo into a clean schematic — no flat scan or perfect lighting required, just keep the drawing in frame.

Why sketch to figure

Sketch to figure, built for the back of a napkin.

Sketch to figure is more than a photo cleanup — it reconstructs what you meant from a rough drawing and rebuilds it as an editable, submission-ready scientific figure.

Intent

Reads what you meant, not just what you drew

LabFig infers the structure behind crooked boxes and half-finished arrows, so the redraw matches the diagram you had in your head — your components, your connections, your flow — instead of inventing a new one.

Preserves layoutInfers structureKeeps your flow
Labels

Turns scrawled handwriting into set type

Your messy marker or pencil labels are transcribed and typeset in clean, consistent sans-serif — no retyping every annotation by hand before the figure looks publishable.

Handwriting transcribedConsistent typeStill editable
Capture

Works straight from a phone photo

No flatbed scanner and no perfect studio shot — a quick phone snap of a whiteboard or notebook is enough. Mild glare, a slight angle, and uneven lighting are handled as long as the sketch stays in frame.

Phone photosGlare-tolerantNo scanner needed

Sketch to Figure FAQ

Common questions about sketch to figure — turning hand-drawn sketches into a scientific figure.

Sketch to figure is LabFig's mode for turning a hand-drawn sketch into a clean, publication-ready scientific figure. You upload a photo of a whiteboard or notebook drawing, and sketch to figure redraws it — straightening the geometry, transcribing your handwriting into crisp type, and aligning every box and arrow to a consistent grid while preserving your original layout and intent. For the bigger picture, read our primer on what AI for scientific figures is.

Yes. A digital sketch exported from an iPad, Procreate, GoodNotes, or any Apple Pencil app feeds sketch to figure just like a photo of a paper drawing — export it as a PNG, JPG, or WebP and upload it. Digital sketches are often cleaner than phone photos, so the scientific figure tends to track your intent even more closely. If you are starting from a finished photo or micrograph rather than a sketch, photo to figure is the better path.

It reads and typesets them. Handwritten gene names, stage labels, and short annotations are transcribed into clean, consistent type rather than redrawn as scribbles. Very faint or overlapping handwriting may need a quick fix on the Vector Canvas, where every transcribed label stays fully editable.

LabFig infers the most likely connections from the layout — which box an arrow leaves and where it lands — and snaps them into a clean, directed flow. If a connector could be read more than one way, generate the draft first, then redirect or relabel that single arrow on the Vector Canvas instead of redrawing the whole figure.

Mild glare, a slight perspective tilt, and uneven lighting are usually fine — LabFig is built to read sketches captured in the real world. For the best read, keep the whole drawing in frame, shoot roughly straight-on, and avoid hard reflections directly over the lines and labels you care about most.

Yes. Alongside the photo you can add a short text instruction — naming a step, fixing a label, or specifying a color or journal style — and sketch to figure uses it to fill in detail your sketch left out, so the scientific figure matches both what you drew and what you described.

Turn your first sketch into a scientific figure

Upload a photo of your whiteboard or notebook drawing into the workbench above and let sketch to figure return a journal-ready scientific figure in minutes — free while you explore.

Shoot roughly straight-on and keep the whole sketch in frame for the cleanest read

Sketch to Figure: Hand-Drawn Sketches into AI Figures | LabFig