Convert JPG to SVG

What makes a JPG harder to trace

JPEG compression stores a picture in small blocks and leaves faint halos around sharp edges. To a tracer, those halos are extra colors: they turn into specks and thin slivers along every line. Three settings deal with it:

• Detail lower, so small specks are dropped instead of traced.
• Colors lower, so the in-between shades of the halos merge into the real colors.
• Smoothness higher, so wobbly edges become clean curves.

Start from the largest, least compressed JPG you have. A logo saved from a website at 200 pixels, or a screenshot of a screenshot, has lost the detail a trace needs; if that is all there is, upscale it in the Photo Editor first, then trace.

A JPG has no transparency, so its background is always a color, usually white. Leave out white skips white and near-white areas, which leaves just the drawing.

Drawings, signatures and photos of paper

The Sketch preset is made for pencil and pen on paper. It turns the picture into ink and paper with a threshold that follows the light across the picture, so a phone photo of a drawing that is brighter on one side than the other still traces evenly.

• Photograph the drawing flat, in daylight, without your shadow across it.
• Crop to the drawing first, in the Photo Editor's crop, so the desk and the page's edges are not traced.
• For a signature you will put on documents or cut from vinyl, Black and white gives one solid color; raise Corners for a softer, rounder pen line.

Traced drawings make good cut files and stamps, and a traced signature stays crisp at any size. For a cutting machine, see SVG files for Cricut.

Photos as vectors

A photo can be traced too, with a painted, poster-like look rather than a faithful copy. The Photo preset keeps many colors and soft changes, and makes thousands of shapes; Poster keeps up to eight flat colors, like a screen print.

Watch the shape count under the preview and the file size in Export: a traced photo can be several megabytes as SVG, more than the JPG it came from. That is fine for a poster effect or a laser engraving, but for a website, the original JPG is lighter.

After tracing

The tracing lands over the picture as a group of shapes, with the JPG hidden underneath. From there it is ordinary vector art:

• Recolor it from Document colors in the Properties panel, where changing one color changes every shape that uses it.
• Delete stray bits with the Selection tool (V) and Delete, and merge pieces with Unite under Pathfinder.
• Smooth the curves further with Object › Path › Simplify….

Export writes the SVG in px, mm, cm, in or pt; PDF with a page per artboard; and PNG, JPG or WebP at an exact width, drawn from the shapes. PNG to SVG covers PNGs with clear backgrounds.