What vectorizing does
A PNG or JPG stores a grid of pixels. Enlarge it and the edges turn blurry or blocky. An SVG stores shapes instead: outlines made of lines and curves, each filled with a color. That is why a vector logo looks just as sharp on a business card as on a billboard.
This tool reduces your image to a handful of flat colors, follows the border of every color area and turns it into straight lines and curves. The result is one shape per color, ready for websites, print, embroidery and cutting machines, design apps and anywhere else an SVG is asked for.
Best results: logos, icons and line art
Images with flat colors and clear edges convert best: logos, icons, stamps, signatures, hand lettering, scanned ink drawings and simple illustrations. Use the largest and sharpest version you have. A tiny or heavily compressed JPG has already lost detail, and the tracer cannot invent it.
For a logo on a plain white or colored background, tick Remove background. The background color that touches the edges of the image becomes transparent, while the same color inside the logo, such as the inside of a letter O, is kept. In Line art mode all white areas become transparent, so only the ink remains.
Photos do not become true vectors
A photo is made of soft gradients and countless shades. Vectorizing one gives a poster-like picture made of flat color areas. It can be a nice effect, but it is not your photo in vector form, and the SVG is often larger than the JPG. If you only need a photo to look sharper when enlarged, an upscaler is the better choice.
How the settings work
Colors: the most colors the SVG may use. For logos and illustrations, shades that are almost the same are merged, so a three color logo stays three colors.
Detail: how small a spot may be before it is merged into its surroundings. Raise it for small text and thin lines, lower it to clean up noise and JPG artifacts.
Smoothness: how closely the outline follows the pixels. Higher values give rounder curves and smaller files, lower values keep sharp corners.
Remove background: a plain background touching the image edges becomes transparent.
A clean, editable SVG
The SVG contains only shapes with fill colors: no scripts, no embedded pixel images and no links. It opens in browsers, Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma, Affinity Designer and most cutting machine software. Each color is a single shape, so you can recolor the whole logo by changing a few values.
Letters become outlines, not editable text. To change a word, type it again in your design app with the right font.