Guide
Everything the converter can do, control by control. Tracing is free at full quality with no account; downloading needs the plan.
Start a trace
Drop a PNG or JPG onto the page — or paste it from the clipboard, or browse for it. The traced result appears side by side with your original, and every slider re-traces live as you move it. There is nothing to install and no signup step; the preview you're looking at is the complete result at full quality.
No file at hand? Under the drop zone sit three samples from our own eval corpus — Try a logo (a crisp black mark), Try a badge (seven flat colours and a text ribbon) and Try a photo (a phone photo of a whiteboard, shadow and all). A click traces it through exactly the path your own upload takes, so the mode switch and the chips behave as they would for your file. On a phone the zone reads differently: Choose image opens your photos or files, and Take a photo opens the camera for a sketch, a whiteboard or a print — the Even lighting offer below is built for exactly that shot.
The preview: zoom, outlines, backdrop
What you see is a picture of your vector, rendered on our server at your screen's own resolution — so what you're judging is the real trace, not an approximation of it.
- Zoom — Fit · 1× · 2× · 4× · 8×. Every level re-renders from the vector, so it stays perfectly sharp however far you go in. Drag to pan while zoomed. While a crisp render is on its way the current picture stretches to where you're headed (soft for a beat, like a map tile) and a status pill says what the server is doing — including the one genuinely long wait, when a zoom lands on a fresh server that has to re-trace your image first. It says so, and it recovers by itself.
- Outlines. Redraws the same trace as contour lines — every shape's boundary as a hairline, no fills. It's the quickest way to see what the vector actually is: how many shapes, where their edges run, whether two tones became one path. It stays hairline at every zoom, and it's a view, not an edit — the SVG a plan would download is unchanged.
- Checker · Light · Dark. Changes only the preview backdrop — useful for checking white fills or transparency. It never affects the traced file.
- New image. Clears the pane for the next upload.
- Original · Preview (phones). On a small screen the two panes become one, led by the traced result, with this toggle to flip back to your upload — and the controls stack beneath it as collapsible groups. Changing any control switches you back to the preview, since that's where the change lands.
- A small upload is shown at its own size rather than blown up to fill the pane, with a note saying so. A full-frame preview never contains more pixels than the file you gave us — you already have those. Zoom in and it's still sharp.
Modes
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| B&W | Traces one silhouette — best for single-colour logos and wordmarks. Threshold decides what counts as ink. |
| Multi-tone | Posterizes into 2–6 gray levels (Gray levels slider). Keep it at 4 or below for now: at 5 or 6 the level search takes ~36 seconds regardless of image size, which on the live site exceeds the request limit and returns nothing. For shaded artwork, Color is faster and better anyway — and the app opens it there for you. |
| Color | Traces full-colour artwork into stacked colour layers — see Colour layers below. |
Artwork B&W can't carry opens in Color on its own. The app checks the pixels you dropped and switches before the first trace, saying so, for either of two reasons: the artwork carries real colour, or real tone (a shaded pencil drawing, a black-and-white photo). Both fail the same way in B&W — a black silhouette. The check only ever moves toward Color: a tint doesn't count as colour (a warm-lit page scan is still a page scan), anti-aliasing doesn't count as tone (a crisp wordmark stays in B&W), and the moment you pick a mode yourself it stops second-guessing you for the rest of the session.
The controls
| Control | Modes | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold | B&W · Multi-tone | The dark/light cutoff (0–255). Auto picks one algorithmically — a good starting point; nudge it manually if thin strokes break up or fatten. |
| Light artwork on dark background | B&W · Multi-tone | Traces the light shapes instead (a white logo on black). Color mode doesn't need it — colours are traced as they are. |
| Grain cleanup | All | Blurs the image 1–3 px before tracing — the fix for grainy or textured art and heavy JPG noise, which otherwise trace as shredded speckles and white "tears" in solid areas. JPG uploads start at 1 px automatically in B&W and Multi-tone (set it to off for a pixel-exact trace); PNGs start at off. In Color it starts off even for JPGs — the palette absorbs grain by itself there, and pre-blurring measurably softens the result. |
| Even lighting | All | For phone photos of sketches, whiteboards and pages. A photo carries the room's light with it: the shadowed side of the paper can be darker than the ink on the bright side, so a plain trace floods it solid. This estimates the lighting and divides it out first. Off by default — flat digital artwork has no lighting to remove — and it costs nothing to try. |
| Speckle removal | All | Ignores blobs up to N pixels — JPG compression noise, scanner dust. In Color the unit changes to a patch side (the slider re-scales when you switch), real ink survives at half the threshold, and the enclosed middle of an A, R, P or B — a letter counter — is left alone at any setting, at its full size. Known limit: very low-contrast small text (pale grey on near-white) can still come out smudged. |
| Corner rounding | B&W · Multi-tone | 0 = sharp polygon corners; higher = smoother curves. |
| Simplification | B&W · Multi-tone | Higher = fewer Bézier nodes and a smaller file, at some fidelity cost. |
| Fill color / Background | B&W · Multi-tone | Output fill colour; background is transparent by default. Color mode keeps the artwork's own colours. |
| Gray levels | Multi-tone | How many tones to posterize into (2–6; keep to 4 or below — see Modes above). |
| Palette size | Color | Auto answers with the number of colours you would count — see below. Set it manually (2–16) any time: above the artwork's own count you get finer shading, below it the closest colours merge. |
The suggestion chip
One line over the preview when the app can see something worth fixing, with the fix as a button and a ✕ to dismiss it for that image:
- Even lighting is offered when the photo carries a strong shadow or bright spot across the frame.
- Auto-clean is offered when the trace came back with a pile of noise specks — one click applies that image's right cleanup (in Color mode it restores that mode's own speckle setting, which is the right medicine there).
If both are true, lighting comes first — cleaning grain cannot rescue a half-black flood. The chip stays quiet when the settings it would change are already where it would put them, and it doesn't cry wolf on small letters: enclosed letter counters aren't counted as specks.
Colour layers
A Color trace quantizes your image to a clean palette, then traces one stacked vector layer per colour. Auto counts colours the way an eye does: it reads only stable pixels (anti-aliased edges never invent colours), groups each shade family together — a softly shaded blue, a glow, a drop shadow all count as one blue — and gives a gradient between two different colours a seat for each end. A five-colour design comes back with five colours. On flat artwork that genuinely carries more inks, Auto can go past the slider's 16, up to 24, stopping only when the two closest colours left are ones you'd call the same.
The Layers panel appears after a colour trace, top layer first:
- Hide/show a layer (the eye), recolour it (the swatch), or Merge… it into another layer — its paths adopt the target's colour and stacking position.
- Group by color joins same-colour layers the tracer split only for stacking reasons — strictly when the join cannot change the picture. The count drops on some artwork and honestly stays put on artwork whose same-colour layers really interleave. It survives a re-trace.
- Undo layer edits restores the trace as it came back, Group by color included.
- Edits apply to what Download and Copy SVG produce — what you arranged is what you get, in every format.
Transparency survives: a logo on a transparent background traces to colour layers on transparency, with no invented background layer. Thin outlines stay whole and keep their own colour — a near-black line over a green field comes back near-black, not green. Colours only a few levels apart stay apart on clean artwork; if a file's own compression noise is wider than the difference between two tones, they still merge, because at that point the difference is no longer in the file.
Gradients come out as flat colour bands — that's inherent to palette tracing, and on a shaded logo it's usually what you want; raise the palette size if you'd rather keep more of the shading. Photos work and can look remarkably faithful, but the files are heavy (hundreds of KB) — lower the palette size to lighten them, and remember photos aren't really vector material.
Large images
Uploads go up to 30 MB. The hosting platform caps a request at ~4.5 MB, so anything bigger is scaled down in your browser before it is sent — and the app says so ("traced at 2455×1878" next to the original's size). Only the pixels that get traced change: the preview keeps your original file, and the SVG is still resolution-independent. Images with transparency stay PNG through that step; opaque ones are re-encoded as JPEG, because a downscaled PNG can come out larger than the original.
Downloading: formats and size
Download SVG — in the header, and beside the result's numbers under the preview — opens the Download screen: your image, the formats, one big button. It's also where the plan lives and where you land after paying. Beside the Download button, Copy SVG to clipboard is the one-click convenience: the SVG as text, with your layer edits applied.
| Format | What it is | Size control |
|---|---|---|
| SVG | The scalable vector — web, print, cutting & design apps | Optional width in px, mm or in, written into the file. Unsized, it is byte-identical to the traced document. |
| Print-ready vector page — opens everywhere | Width in px @ DPI, mm, or in; the page is that measurement. Multi-tone's translucent layers carry over exactly. | |
| EPS | Classic vector for Illustrator-class and sign apps | Same as PDF. Not available for Multi-tone — PostScript has no translucency, and the card says so rather than approximating. |
| PNG | Clean raster of the traced result | 1× / 2× / 4× of the source grid; scales over the 48 MP ceiling are greyed with a note. |
Size. One width plus a unit; the height always follows your image's aspect. Pixel sizes going onto a PDF/EPS page take a DPI (default 96 — the standard definition of a CSS pixel, what browsers and Inkscape assume). A 100 mm export measures 100 mm in the consuming app, to the third decimal. The recap line under the format cards says exactly what file you'll get — format, layers, and the measured page when you've set one.
Your plan, access and billing
- Subscribe. Click Download → the screen shows the plan when a download needs one → Subscribe. Stripe Checkout collects your email and card — no password, no account; the email is the whole identity. When you land back, the same trace is on screen — settings and layer edits intact — with a green "Payment confirmed" strip and the Download button ready. (Your image rides in your browser's own storage for the trip, never on our servers, for 48 hours.)
- A welcome email arrives after checkout with where your downloads live and how to unlock any other browser.
- Left and came back? If the pane is empty and your last image is still stashed, a Resume chip on the upload screen brings it back — traced, edits and all.
- Another browser, cleared storage? You're subscribed — upload the image again and Download just works; no second checkout, ever. For a browser without the credential: enter the email you paid with → Email me a link. The link works once, expires in about an hour, and unlocks that browser. The answer looks the same whether or not an email has a plan — on purpose.
- Manage billing (card, invoices, cancel) emails a one-time link too: the inbox click is what opens the Stripe portal, so someone at your unlocked browser never sees your card details. Cancelling keeps downloads until the period you paid for ends.
- If the screen says "Checkout isn't open yet", billing genuinely isn't live on that deployment — nothing to enter, nothing charged.
Tips for best results
- Higher-resolution input = smoother curves. A 1000px+ logo traces much better than a 200px one.
- For JPGs or scans in B&W, raise Speckle removal until the noise disappears. For film grain or paper texture, Speckle removal alone isn't enough — big grain clusters survive it. Use Grain cleanup (1 px is usually plenty — already the default for JPGs), then keep Speckle removal around 15.
- In Color mode, try the defaults first. The palette folds grain back into the ink it came from; on the textured artwork this was measured against, the untouched defaults beat every recipe the sliders can reach.
- Photographed anything — turn on Even lighting. The app watches for the condition and offers it, but the offer is deliberately conservative: a shadow that darkens the frame evenly at all four edges doesn't trip it, so if a photo looks flooded, tick the box yourself before assuming it can't help.
- If thin strokes break up or fatten, nudge Threshold manually instead of Auto.
- Your images are processed in memory and never stored. Tracing runs on our servers by design — the honest privacy claim is "processed in memory, never stored".
Something here not matching what you see? The app updates continuously; tell us and we'll fix the page or the app, whichever is wrong.
Trace something. The preview is the demo.
Full quality, no watermark, no account — see your own artwork first.
Open the converter