Turn artwork into DXF geometry your CAM software can offset
Everything the spindle does begins one step after this file. The DXF you take away is not a toolpath — it is the sketch a CAM package reads before working out where the cutter travels. Fusion 360, VCarve and Carbide Create all work the same way round: geometry comes in, you select a contour, and the software offsets it by half the tool diameter to settle which side of the line the bit rides. Get the geometry right and the rest is ordinary shop work.
What that offset step cares about is closure. A profile operation needs a loop that returns to where it began before it can tell an inside from an outside, and closure falls out of the method here: the tracer measures boundaries between colour regions, and a region boundary closes by construction. They are written as LWPOLYLINE entities where the edge runs straight and open degree-3 SPLINE entities where it curves, in DXF R2010 (AC1024) — the header Fusion 360 and FreeCAD both read directly.
One distinction is worth fixing before the first job, because it catches people at the engraving stage. A traced contour is the edge of a shape, never a line down the middle of it. Trace a letter and you get the letter's outline — two boundaries around every stroke — not a single path following its spine.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Upload flat artwork as PNG, JPEG or WEBP, one image per conversion.
- Set colours to 2 for a single cutting profile, or 3 to 4 when the piece also needs an engraved layer.
- Leave shape stacking on Cut-outs, tick DXF, and type the finished width and height into the millimetre fields.
- Read the preview, then sign in with Google (free) to download the DXF.
- Import it — the file names its own unit, millimetres — then chain the contours and apply your tool offset in CAM.
Who this is for
Router and mill work is where this converter earns its keep on drawn material: a shop sign whose lettering exists only as a customer's PNG, an inlay pattern, a machine badge, artwork laid out in a paint program. The errand never changes — someone has pixels, the CAM software wants curves.
It pays to be blunt about where the workflow stops. Trace a photograph and the contours come back organically wavy, following every shadow edge, compression artefact and speck of sensor noise. They are geometrically valid, and they machine badly: the offset calculation copes, but the cutter spends the job making hundreds of small direction changes, the finish suffers and cycle time climbs. Hard-edged work — logos, signage lettering, stencils, drawn shapes — resolves into long smooth runs instead, the geometry a machine likes.
So treat this as a way to recover artwork, not to reverse-engineer a photographed part. The file holds measured geometry and nothing else — no dimensions, no constraints, no design history — so if the piece must mate with something, check it against your own reference after import.
Settings we suggest
Colours doubles as the layer control. At 2 you get one closed contour per island on a single geometry layer — all a straight profile cut needs. At 3 or 4 the cutting boundary and the engraved detail land on separate layers named FILL_ plus that colour's hex value, so you assign a tool to a layer rather than picking contours by hand. The slider reaches 64; past about six on a router you are making work for yourself.
Shape stacking: Cut-outs. Holes arrive as their own loops nested inside the profile around them, which is what lets an offset routine work round the inside of an opening rather than the outside. Stacked shares edges between neighbours, and a shared edge turns into a doubled pass. Draw style and grouping never reach the DXF writer, so neither matters here.
Fill in both millimetre fields. What you type is applied to the DXF and is the only dependable way to pin physical size, since anything above 1.5 megapixels is downscaled before tracing. Left empty, the scale falls out of the pixel grid at 96 px = 25.4 mm. Coordinates sit at millimetre scale and the header records that, $INSUNITS = 4, so a CAM front end that reads the variable opens the sketch in millimetres; one that ignores it and assumes inches brings the drawing in 25.4 times too large, and that is the setting to correct.
Questions
Will my CAM importer take the splines, or does it want polylines?
Both are in the file: LWPOLYLINE for straight runs, open degree-3 SPLINE for curves. Spline handling differs more between importers than polyline handling does, and some older CAM importers get along better with polylines — worth a test file before you commit a sheet. Most CAD front ends can approximate a spline as a polyline if yours needs it.
Does the DXF contain a toolpath?
No — it is the input to one. What comes out is geometry at millimetre scale; tool diameter, offset side, depth per pass, lead-ins, tabs and feeds all stay with your CAM package. The DXF is the sketch that operation gets built on.
I want to V-carve lettering. Is a traced outline the right input?
For a V-carve, yes: it works from bounded regions and cuts the material between them, so each letter's outline is what it expects. A single scribed groove down the centre of a stroke needs a centreline, which tracing cannot give you — it measures the edge between two colours, so a stroke returns as two edges. Single-line engraving is drawn, not traced.
My traced outline is covered in tiny wiggles.
Usually the source rather than a fault: photographic material and softly rescaled artwork carry edge detail the tracer duly follows. Convert again at 2 colours so the engine hunts one boundary rather than a stack of tonal bands; survivors are in the artwork itself.
What are the limits, and what does it cost?
One image per conversion, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line or noisy images take longer, and a conversion that has not finished within 60 seconds stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image. Free and watermark-free: look at the preview first, then a free Google sign-in releases the download. Signed out you get 10 conversions per hour; signed in, 60 per hour and 300 per day. Download links expire after 1 hour, and uploads and generated files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.