PLOTCASTER Open the tool

PNG to SVG converter

Choose a PNG and get an SVG made of real shapes with smooth curved edges, traced in black and white or in up to twelve flat colours.

Free, no account. The file is read by code running in your browser. It is not uploaded, and nothing about it is stored.

or drop it here, or paste

How to convert a PNG to SVG

  1. Choose your PNG or drop it on the box.
  2. Pick black and white for logos, line art and cut files, or colours for flat-colour artwork.
  3. Move the threshold or the number of colours until the preview looks right.
  4. Download the SVG.

What the converter does

A PNG is a grid of pixels; an SVG is a set of shapes. Getting from one to the other means tracing: finding the edge of each area of colour and describing it as a curve. This tracer follows edges to a fraction of a pixel, using the soft pixels along an anti-aliased edge to work out where the true edge runs, and then fits Bézier curves through them. Straight sides come out as straight lines and corners stay sharp.

Some converters only wrap the PNG inside an SVG file. That gives a file ending in .svg that is still made of pixels, blurs when enlarged and cannot be cut. The SVG from this page contains paths only.

Getting a clean result from a PNG

  • Use the largest PNG you have. A logo 200 pixels wide has little edge to follow. From about 800 pixels the trace is hard to tell from the original.
  • Transparent PNGs work. Transparency is treated as white paper.
  • Black and white: the threshold decides how dark a pixel must be to count as ink. Raise it to thicken thin lines, lower it to drop pale smudges.
  • Colours: use as few as the artwork really has. Extra colours only trace the soft edges between the real ones.
  • Smoothing is chosen for you. Turn it up for a PNG with hard, jagged pixels; down to keep tiny details.

For cutting machines

For Cricut, Silhouette and laser cutters, trace in black and white: one colour means one clean outline to cut. Each shape in the SVG is a closed path. If you would rather start from artwork that is already cut-ready, the free SVG library has welded files with measured cut lengths.

Questions

Can it convert a photo?

It will, but a photo traced into flat colours looks like a poster, not a photo. To turn a photo into line art for a plotter or dots for a laser, use the Plotcaster editor, which is built for that.

How big can the PNG be?

Any size. Pictures over 2,000 pixels on the longer side are scaled down to that before tracing, which is already more detail than a trace can use.

Why are there small gaps or blobs in the result?

Specks in the PNG are traced like everything else. Raise “Ignore specks under” to drop them, or raise the smoothing.

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