Vectorise an image

What vectorising is for

An ordinary photo or a downloaded logo is a bitmap, a grid of pixels. Enlarge it and it goes soft, with jagged edges. A vector describes shapes and areas of colour instead of pixels, so it blows up to a billboard or shrinks to an icon and stays sharp either way. That suits logos, icons, pictograms and simple illustrations you need at print quality or as an SVG for the web.

How the tool converts an image

First the image is reduced to the number of colours you choose. Each colour is then traced along the pixel boundary into closed shapes, and those shapes are simplified so a staircase edge becomes a straight line. The result is an SVG built from solid areas. The colour slider controls how faithfully the colours survive, the detail slider how precisely the shapes are traced. Fewer colours and less detail give a smaller, cleaner file.

This is posterised tracing, not the smooth-curve tracing of expensive graphics software. For logos and flat illustrations it still gives a result you can use as it comes.

Frequently asked questions

Which images work best?

Flat shapes with clearly separated colours: logos, icons, symbols and drawn illustrations. Photos with soft gradients can be converted too, but the result looks poster-like, broken into a handful of colour areas.

Why is the image scaled down before tracing?

Tracing works pixel by pixel; on a large image it would take a long time and add far more points than necessary. Scaling the longer side to 640 pixels speeds the computation up. The resulting SVG is a vector, so you can then enlarge it to any size without losing quality.

Do you send the image to a server?

No. The whole conversion runs in your browser; neither the image nor the finished SVG goes anywhere.