Ink drawings, sketches, comics, signatures and scanned artwork trace best as one colour, so the tool starts here on Black and white with an automatic threshold. Everything darker than the threshold becomes black shapes, and the paper becomes transparent.
Tracing a drawing step by step
- Scan or photograph the drawing flat and evenly lit, and crop it to the artwork.
- Drop it on the box. The automatic threshold is chosen from the image’s own mix of dark and light, and the number it picked is shown next to the slider.
- Adjust the threshold if strokes break up (move it right) or the paper grain shows (move it left).
- Pick the smoothness. Balanced keeps the character of hand-drawn lines. Smooth and Smoothest even out a shaky line and remove the specks of a dusty scan; Every detail keeps the texture of a dry brush or a stipple.
- Download the SVG. It holds one colour, black, as a single set of shapes; recolour it in any vector editor.
What you can do with traced line art
A traced drawing scales from a sticker to a poster without going blurry, and it prints with perfectly crisp edges. Black-and-white vector art is also what vinyl cutters, stencils, screen printing, rubber stamps and laser engraving work from, because every shape is a clear outline. For a laser cutter, the image to DXF page sets the same tracing up for cut files in millimetres.
The holes stay holes: the white inside a closed loop is cut out of the black shape, not painted white, so the drawing works on a coloured background too.