Turn an image into an SVG you can actually edit

Vectorize takes a raster image made of pixels and returns an SVG: a file of paths, curves and fills rather than a grid of coloured dots. Scale it to a billboard and nothing softens, because there is nothing to soften.

There is no prompt and no model to choose. You hand it one image and it hands back one file.

What it is actually for

The honest scope is narrower than “any image”, and knowing where the edge is saves you the credit and the disappointment.

It works on art that was already flat:

• A logo you have as a PNG and need as a vector, because the printer asked.
• An icon or a pictogram: one or two colours, hard edges, no gradient.
• A flat illustration: a line drawing, a badge, a monogram, a wordmark.
• A screenshot of a chart or a diagram made of blocks and rules.

It does not work on photographs, and this is not a quality problem you can prompt your way past. A photograph has no edges in the sense a vector needs. It has a continuous field of colour that shades into itself, and tracing that produces thousands of overlapping blobs approximating a gradient. The file is larger than the photograph, slower to open, and looks worse.

If you could not redraw it with a pen and five flat fills, it is not a vectorising job.

Give it the cleanest source you have

The tracer follows edges. Everything that blurs an edge in the source becomes a wobble in the path.

Start from the largest version you have. A 200-pixel logo scaled up in your head is still a 200-pixel logo to the tracer, and every stair-step on its diagonals becomes a node. If the only copy you have is small, run Upscale first and vectorise the result, and that order matters, because upscaling an SVG is meaningless and upscaling the raster is the only place the extra resolution can come from.

Remove the background first if there is one. A logo sitting on a photograph of a desk traces the desk too. Remove background returns transparency, and transparency traces as nothing rather than as a shape.

Prefer PNG to JPEG. JPEG compression puts faint ringing around every hard edge, which is exactly where the tracer is looking. On a flat logo the artefacts are invisible to you and perfectly visible to the algorithm.

Flatten drop shadows and glows out of the source. A soft shadow is a gradient, and a gradient traced becomes a stack of near-identical shapes. Cut it in the raster, add it back in your vector editor where it costs one attribute.

What comes back, and what you can do with it

The result lands in your library as an SVG. Open it in any vector editor, whether Illustrator, Figma, Affinity or Inkscape, and the paths are real: selectable, editable, recolourable.

Two things to know about it inside the studio:

• An SVG cannot be used as a reference image. Every other tool output can be fed back into a generation as a reference; this one cannot, because the models take raster input. If you want the vectorised look back in a picture, export a PNG from your editor and bring that in.
• It is a finished asset, not an intermediate. The point of vectorising is usually to leave, for a print file, a favicon set, an app icon or a cutting machine, and the studio is happy to be the place that produced it rather than the place it lives.

When it goes wrong

The paths are a mess of tiny fragments

The source had noise, compression artefacts or a gradient in it. Every one of those becomes geometry.

Fix: go back further up your own chain. A cleaner, larger, uncompressed source is worth more here than any amount of editing afterwards, and if the only source is a photograph, this is the wrong tool.

The colours are close but not exact

Tracing quantises: it decides how many fills the image is made of, and picks each one from the pixels. On a brand colour that is a near-miss, and a near-miss on a brand colour is a miss.

Fix: open the SVG and set the fills to your actual hex values. It is a thirty-second job in any editor and it is the last thing standing between the trace and a usable asset.

Text came back as shapes rather than as text

It did, and it always will. Letterforms in the source are pixels like everything else, so they are traced as outlines. That is fine for a logotype, since outlines are what you want in a print file and need no font, and useless if you meant to edit the words.

Fix: set the text in your editor over the traced mark, and keep the mark as artwork.

The other road: draw the vector in the first place

The catalog has an image model that outputs SVG directly: you describe the mark and it returns paths, with no raster stage and nothing to trace.

Which road you take depends on what you already have:

• You have a mark, and it must stay exactly that mark → vectorize. It is a conversion, it is faithful, and it costs a fraction of a generation.
• You want a mark, and have not settled on one → generate the vector. You get a design rather than a transcription, and you can ask for five directions and choose.

Reaching for vectorize to invent a logo is asking a photocopier to be an illustrator. Reaching for the model to convert a logo you already own is asking an illustrator to trace, and it will improvise where you wanted fidelity.