Convert JPG to SVG, with the grain cleaned and the whole result before you pay

JPGs are noisy. The tracer knows.

Every JPG carries compression noise: faint blocks and ringing around each edge that a tracer reads as hundreds of tiny shapes. Unpixel starts a JPG upload at 1 pixel of Grain cleanup — a blur applied before tracing, measured on real files to be the cleanest default — and Speckle removal drops what is left. If a result still comes back grainy, the app says so and offers Auto-clean in one click.

The edges that matter survive the cleanup: a logo saved as a JPG traces to the same handful of paths a PNG of it would, with counters open and corners intact.

About the white background

A JPG cannot carry transparency, but the SVG can. In B&W and Multi-tone only the ink is traced and the background stays transparent by default — choose Solid background in the Style panel if you want one baked in. In Colour mode the background is its own layer at the bottom of the stack: hide it in the layer panel and the file you download leaves it out.

The preview is free. The file is the paid part.

Every trace renders the complete result at full quality: unwatermarked, every control live, zoomable to 8× with the picture re-rendered from the vector at each step, and an Outlines view that shows the curve network itself. That is the whole free experience, it needs no account, and it is unlimited. The plan is what turns a result into a file.

Measured, not promised

Every change to the tracing engine runs against a fixed corpus of 44 traces before it ships — logos, wordmarks, clip art, scans, screenshots, phone photos — and each row is gated on pixel similarity, edge structure, speck count, anchor count and time. A change that regresses a gate does not ship. Engine v0.19, the version tracing your file today, holds all 44.

• A logo saved as a JPG traces to one path, 61 anchor points and a 2.6 KB file at 99.1% pixel agreement after the 1-pixel cleanup, with zero specks.
• A grainy JPG portrait shreds into 310 specks with cleanup off; the default cleanup leaves 2, and Auto-clean leaves 0.
• A phone photo of a whiteboard scores 48% edge structure on the defaults and 99.9% with Even lighting on — the difference between a black flood and the drawing.

Numbers from our own evaluation corpus, built from our own artwork and measured at engine v0.19. The corpus only grows: hard cases stay in it.

When a JPG does not trace clean

A converter that only shows its good side is not worth the price it asks, so here is the other side. Each of these shows in the preview before any payment.

• Heavy compression — a tiny, much-resaved JPG — leaves blocks larger than the lines. Raise Grain cleanup to 2 or 3 px and accept softer corners, or find a better copy.
• A photograph of a scene comes back posterized: Colour mode builds the file from flat inks, so smooth tone becomes a few flat steps. This converter is for logos, drawings and flat artwork; it is honest about photographs rather than good at them.
• A shadow across a photographed page traces as a black flood on the default settings. The app detects it and offers Even lighting; the fix is one click, but it is a click.
• Tiny type in a tiny image can be eaten by the default speckle removal. Upload the largest version you have, and lower Speckle removal if letters break.

Questions people ask before dropping a JPG