Guide · 5 min read · updated September 2026
The brief is always the same shape: the logo exists as a PNG someone found in an old email, and now it's needed on a sign, a vehicle, an embroidery file or a cutting machine — anything where a 400-pixel image falls apart. Tracing it into vector paths is a solved problem. Getting a clean result depends almost entirely on what you feed the tracer, so this guide is mostly about the image, not the tool.
What tracing does
A vectoriser reduces the image to a handful of flat colours, then follows the edge of each colour region and writes it out as a path. That is the whole trick, whether it's Illustrator's Image Trace, an online AI vectoriser, or Sourceback. The output is only as good as those edges: crisp, high-contrast regions give clean paths; soft, noisy or gradient-filled regions give a thicket of tiny shapes.
Images that trace cleanly
- Flat-colour logos and wordmarks with two to six colours.
- Line art, icons, stamps, badges.
- Anything originally drawn as vectors and exported to PNG — the edges are still geometrically simple even after rasterising.
- Larger sources. 1000 pixels across gives the tracer far more edge to follow than 200.
Images that never will
- Photographs, and logos with photographic elements. There are no flat regions to find; the trace becomes thousands of slivers. The preview's fidelity score drops and the tool warns you.
- Gradients and drop shadows. A smooth ramp becomes a stack of banded shapes. Sometimes acceptable for a subtle shadow, never for a gradient that is the logo.
- Tiny, blurry or heavily compressed JPEGs. Compression halos around edges get traced as their own colour. A 96-pixel favicon is not a source.
- Screenshots with anti-aliased text at small sizes. Letters below about 40 pixels tall lose their counters and joins.
If the logo blurs when you zoom in, the trace will be a clean outline of a blurry thing. Fix the image first, or find a bigger one.
Preparing a borderline image
Five minutes in any image editor moves an image from the second list to the first.
- Find the largest copy. Check the company's website (often the header logo is an SVG already — right-click, open in new tab, look at the URL), press kits, LinkedIn banners, old PDFs (a logo inside a PDF is frequently still a vector; the brand-asset extractor pulls it out directly, no tracing needed).
- Crop to the logo with a little margin. Background clutter becomes stray shapes.
- Kill the background. If it's on a photo or a textured card, cut it out onto flat white or transparent. The tracer treats the background as a colour like any other.
- Flatten the palette. If the logo has a subtle gradient that isn't essential, pick the mid colour and paint it flat. You'll get one clean path instead of twenty.
- Upscale sensibly. Doubling a 300-pixel image with a decent resampler gives cleaner edges than tracing at 300. Don't go beyond about 3× or you're just tracing interpolation.
- Don't sharpen. Sharpening adds halos; halos become colours.
Settings that matter
Sourceback's vectoriser picks the colour count itself unless you set one. For a two-colour mark, setting 2 removes any anti-aliasing colours that would otherwise become hairline shapes around every edge. The accent-preserving palette (the default) keeps small brand colours — a single red dot, a thin gold rule — that an area-based palette would drop in favour of background shades. Leave detail at 1 unless the result is jagged (raise it) or has too many nodes for a cutter (lower it).
Checking the result
The free preview shows the traced vector next to the original. Look for three things: counters (the holes in a, e, B) are open; thin strokes haven't broken into dashes; small accent colours are present as their own layer. Each colour comes out as a separate, named layer in the SVG, which is what you want for a cutter or for recolouring in Illustrator, Figma or Inkscape.
A note on doing the letters properly
If the "logo" is mostly a wordmark and you can identify the typeface, retyping it in the real font will always beat a trace. If the letters are custom and you need to type with them, that's a different job — see Turn a logo into a complete font.
The short version
- Tracing follows edges. Flat colours and big, sharp sources trace well; photos, gradients and small JPEGs don't.
- Look for a bigger or original copy first — a logo inside a PDF is often still a vector.
- Crop, remove the background, flatten unnecessary gradients, upscale modestly.
- Set the colour count for simple marks, and check counters and thin strokes in the preview before paying.