New to vector art? Here is what every box above does, in plain words. Tap any ? next to a box to jump to its explanation.
- Your picture
- The PNG or JPG you want to turn into vector art. Tap the box or drop a file on it. Flat art works best: logos, lettering and drawings with solid colors. Photos do not trace well.
- What kind of art?
- Pick the one that matches your picture and the tool sets everything else for you. "Logo, 1 color" makes one ink, like black film. "Logo, 2–4 colors" is for most shirt logos. "Detailed art" keeps more small bits and allows up to 8 colors. This tool is made for flat art with solid colors, not photos or color fades.
- Optimize curves
- Joins tiny curve pieces into fewer, smoother ones, so the shapes have fewer points and are easier to edit. Leave it on unless small corners are getting rounded off.
- Number of colors
- How many ink colors to split the art into, from 1 to 8. 1 makes a single ink, like black film. More colors means more screens. Count the colors in your logo and start there.
- Threshold (light/dark cut-off)
- In Advanced settings, only for 1 color. Every spot in your picture gets a lightness number from 0 (black) to 255 (white); anything darker than the Threshold becomes ink and anything lighter is left blank. Slide right to grab lighter parts too, slide left to keep only the darkest parts. 128 is the middle.
- Invert
- Only for 1 color. Swaps ink and no ink, for white art on a dark picture.
- Detail
- How small a speck can be and still get traced. Low drops dust and tiny dots. High keeps every little bit, and also keeps noise. Start in the middle.
- Smoothness
- How round the edges come out. 0 keeps sharp, blocky corners. Higher numbers give smooth curves, good for lettering.
- Remove background
- Leaves out the plain background around the art, like a white box around a logo, so you do not print a big square of ink.
- Keep the picture colors
- When off, each color snaps to the closest common ink color, so you get real ink colors. Turn it on to use the exact colors from the picture.
- Stack colors
- Lays colors on top of each other so no thin white lines show between them. Leave it off to cut each color out of the others (a knockout), which is how most screen printers set up colors.
- Print width
- How wide the art should be on the shirt, in inches, for example 10. The height follows automatically. It sets the size of the SVG and PDF you download.
- Download SVG or PDF
- SVG is vector art you can open in most design programs and in the Vector Editor. PDF is a print-ready page at your print width. Files go to your Downloads folder.
- Open in Vector Editor
- Sends the traced art to the free Vector Editor, where you can change colors, fix shapes point by point, add text and save it.
- Who made the tracing engine
- This tool uses Potrace by Peter Selinger, in a JavaScript version by kilobtye. It is free software under the GNU GPL (version 2 or later). The license comes with the files (vector-editor/assets/trace/POTRACE-COPYING-GPL-2.0.txt), and the readable source is vector-editor/assets/trace/potrace.js.
