Convert JPG to SVG — Real Vector Tracing

Raster to vector: what actually happens

A JPG is a grid of coloured pixels. An SVG describes shapes: “fill this outline with this colour”. Converting between them is called tracing or vectorising, and it happens in three steps here:

1. Reduce the colours. The picture is quantised to the number of colours you pick, so each pixel belongs to one flat colour.
2. Find the edges. For every colour, the borders of its regions are followed pixel by pixel, and specks smaller than the detail setting are dropped.
3. Fit curves. Each border is replaced with straight lines and smooth quadratic curves, which is what makes the result scale cleanly.

JPG compression leaves faint blocky noise around edges, which a tracer would happily turn into hundreds of tiny paths. The Logo and Black & white presets snap colours to a small palette first, which cleans most of it away. If you have the original as a PNG, use the PNG to SVG converter instead — it keeps transparency and has no compression noise.

Which preset for which picture

Getting a clean trace

• Start big and sharp. A tiny, blurry JPG gives wobbly outlines. If yours is small, enlarge it first with the image upscaler.
• Crop to the subject. Background clutter becomes extra paths; trim it with the image cropper.
• Use as few colours as the design really has. A two-colour logo traced with 16 colours picks up every anti-aliasing shade along its edges.
• Remove a white background before tracing with Make Background Transparent, then trace the PNG.

When not to convert to SVG

Photos are the wrong job for SVG. A faithful vector photo would need tens of thousands of paths and be many times larger than the JPG. For photos on the web, a compressed WebP is smaller and sharper; keep SVG for logos, icons, diagrams and anything that needs to be cut, engraved or printed at large sizes.