How to convert a PNG to SVG
- Choose your image. Drop a PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF or BMP on the box, or tap it to pick a file. The tracing starts at once and the SVG appears next to the original.
- Pick Colour or Black and white. Colour keeps the image's colours, reduced to the number you choose. Black and white makes one set of black shapes, which is what stencils, stamps, vinyl and laser cutting need.
- Set the colours and smoothness. Every change traces the image again, usually within a few seconds; big photos take longer. Use the 2× and 4× zoom to compare edges up close; both panes scroll together, and on a phone the Original and SVG buttons flip between the two.
- Download. Download SVG saves the file, Copy SVG code puts the markup on your clipboard for a web page, and in Black and white mode Download DXF saves cut lines for laser software and CAD.
Choosing the settings
Colours. Count the colours you can see and choose that number, counting the background. A logo in navy and orange on white needs 3. If a detail disappears, add one colour; if you see outlines of an odd colour around shapes, take one away. The swatches under the result show exactly which colours the SVG uses, as hex codes you can copy into brand guidelines or CSS.
Smoothness. Balanced suits most logos. Go down to Detailed or Every detail for small text and icons with crisp corners; go up to Smooth or Smoothest for scans, blurry or low-resolution images and photos, where it also removes specks. Long straight stretches are drawn as straight lines, with a sharp corner where two of them meet; Smoothest also rounds right angles. Lines only a pixel or two thick come out a little rounded at any setting, so start from the biggest copy of the image you have.
Threshold (black and white). Automatic picks the split between dark and light from the image itself, which works for clean drawings. For a pale pencil sketch, move it right so fainter lines turn black; for a scan with a grey background, move it left.
Centre line (black and white). For machines that draw rather than cut shapes, such as plotters holding a pen or lasers engraving lines, this gives one stroke per ink line, running down its middle, instead of a filled outline. It suits pen drawings, handwriting and signatures; solid areas shrink to a few lines. See the centerline trace page for more.
Add bridges (DXF). A stencil cut from a traced letter O loses its middle. With bridges on, every such loose piece is tied to the sheet by a strip as wide as you set in millimetres, placed where it is shortest. That can be through a thin line that touches the letter, which then gets a gap of the bridge's width, so check the preview.
Transparent background (colour). Leaves out the colour around the image's edges, so the logo sits on whatever is behind it. Transparent parts of a PNG are always left out.
Reading the result
The line under the preview counts the colours, the shapes (each separate area of one colour) and the curve points in the file, with its size. Fewer points means a cleaner file that is easier to edit and cut. A clean logo usually needs a few dozen shapes; if you see thousands, the image is probably a photo or very noisy, and more smoothness or fewer colours will help.
Two neighbouring colours use one and the same border in the file, so their shapes never overlap or leave a gap. Each shape also extends underneath the smaller shapes that sit on top of it, covering their whole area, so the background never shows through as a faint line where colours meet. In a vector editor you can select, move or recolour each area on its own.
What tracing can and can't do
Tracing redraws the image as outlines of flat colour. Logos, icons, clip art, signatures, drawings and text come out as crisp vectors that stay sharp at any size. Gradients, shadows and photos turn into bands of flat colour, like a screen print. A tiny image has little to go on: a 64-pixel icon gives rounded, simplified shapes, so use the largest copy you have. And tracing never turns text back into editable letters; the letters become shapes.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. The image is read and traced by a background worker on this page, the SVG and DXF are written on your device, and no copy is sent anywhere. A shared result link carries only file sizes, counts and your settings, never the image.
Related tools
Need a smaller PNG or JPG instead of a vector? Use the image compressor. To check what a photo reveals before you post it, open it in the EXIF viewer. And for a carving pattern from a ready-made design, try the pumpkin stencil maker.