For pen plotters and laser engravers

Ink or paper. Turn a photo, or any place on Earth, into dots and lines for a pen plotter or laser.

A pen is down or up. A laser fires or doesn't. Plotcaster turns every grey into those marks and saves a millimetre SVG or a 1-bit PNG at your laser's DPI.

Turn a photo into line art Make a map

Free · no account · no install Photos never leave your device.

A lion's face as 1-bit dots for a laser, dithered with Atkinson — Lion, Andreas Vonlanthen, 2025, Unsplash License.

The same face drawn in pen lines for a plotter, in the Engrave style — Lion, Andreas Vonlanthen, 2025, Unsplash License.

Also on Plotcaster

For Cricut, Silhouette and lasers Free SVG cut files 19,190 designs in 1,437 sets, each as SVG, PNG and DXF. Free to use on things you sell. Browse the library →
Layered paper art Shadow box maker 212 ready-made scenes. Move, swap and resize anything, then download one sheet per layer. Choose a scene →
In your browser File tools PNG or JPG to SVG, SVG to PNG, an SVG viewer and a DPI checker. Nothing is uploaded. See the tools →

Styles

17 ways to draw a photo

A pen can't print grey, so most styles draw more where the photo is darker. Each starts tuned to your photo. Pick one, nudge a slider, download.

See every style → Compare side by side →

8 of the 17 styles, each a whole A5 drawing, with settings picked for its photo. Minutes are the tool's plot-time estimate after paths are sorted and joined. All are drawn from the lion photo (Andreas Vonlanthen, 2025, Unsplash License).

A plotted map of central Edinburgh: black streets and railways, the Water of Leith and ponds in blue, orange contours on Arthur's Seat, and the title Edinburgh, Scotland, with coordinates and credit. — Central Edinburgh, 3.3 km across, on A4. Made by the tool from OpenStreetMap and open elevation data.

SVG layers, named for AxiDraw's layer control
Layer	Pen	Paths
1 Contours	0.35 mm	61
2 Bold contours	0.56 mm	14
3 Water	0.35 mm	33
4 Streams	0.24 mm	18
5 Streets	0.35 mm	842
6 Rail	0.35 mm	27
7 Major roads	0.49 mm	38
8 Frame and title	0.35 mm	152

Maps

Plot any place

Find a town, coastline or mountain and frame it. Streets, water and rail come from OpenStreetMap, contours from open elevation data. Each kind of feature gets its own pen layer. A single-stroke font lets the pen write the title and credit.

Inks: 3
Pen layers: 8
Paths: 1,185
Plot time: 17 min

Orange Contours, bold contours 75 paths
Blue Water, streams 51 paths
Black Streets, rail, major roads, frame and title 1,059 paths

Make a map Map art guide →

Yr Wyddfa as 64 stacked land profiles, title and coordinates below. — **Ridgelines** stacks elevation data into profiles, hidden lines removed: Yr Wyddfa, 64 lines on A4 landscape. Stack a mountain →

Maps and scans

Already have the picture?

Two styles pull clean pen lines out of an image. Map extraction guide →

Trace colour

Traces one colour as single strokes: roads from a map screenshot, brown contours from a topo scan, ink from a drawing. Pick the colour from the picture.

A crop of the Edinburgh map: black streets, blue water, orange contours around Arthur's Seat. — In: a map image, three inks

Trace a colour

Contours

Reads a photo or greyscale heightmap as land and draws its contours, with every few on a bolder pen layer. Terrarium elevation tiles work too.

A Yr Wyddfa heightmap in 1-bit dots, light where land is high. — In: a Yr Wyddfa heightmap

The same mountain as contours, every fifth line bold. — Out: 30 levels, every fifth bold

Draw contours

Lasers

16 ways to make grey out of black

Tone on a laser comes from pattern. Choose Bayer grids, blue noise, Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson and more. Each row is real tool output: a grey ramp and a lion's eyes.

Dither a photo The algorithms compared →