Send your printer an EPS, not a JPEG of your logo
The request always arrives the same way. A customer emails their logo over, the print shop writes back that it can only work from vector EPS, and the only copy anyone can find is a JPEG: forwarded through three inboxes, pasted into a slide deck, saved again. The original artwork left with a designer who stopped answering email years ago.
The shop is not being awkward. Its workflow places outlines it can scale to a shopfront banner or pull apart into spot colours, and a photograph of a logo offers neither. Renaming the file changes nothing; dropping the JPEG into a layout document only wraps the same pixels in a new envelope. Someone has to measure those pixel edges and rebuild them as curves.
That is what happens here. Upload the JPEG, tick EPS, and a geometric tracer segments the picture into flat colour regions, models the anti-aliased boundary between them and fits curves along it. Back comes an EPSF-3.0 file of filled paths, no bitmap hiding inside. The rest of this page is about the detail that catches people out: JPEG compression leaves a faint halo along every edge, and a tracer will draw it unless you stop it.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Upload the JPEG your customer sent. PNG, JPEG and WEBP are accepted, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels, one image per conversion.
- Set Colours to roughly the number of inks in the logo — 6 to 10 for flat artwork, 2 for a single-colour mark.
- Leave Draw style on Fill shapes and Shape stacking on Cut-outs, tick EPS, and fill in the millimetre size if the shop quoted one.
- Convert, then read the preview along the letter edges before you commit to the file.
- Sign in with Google (free) to download the EPS, and open it once in your layout application before forwarding it to the shop.
Who this is for
This page is for whoever stands in the middle of that email thread: the prepress operator who has to make the job work, the freelancer asked to "just vectorise it", or the owner of the business whose logo is now a 900-pixel attachment.
EPS earns its place in printing through sheer stubbornness. It has outlived a long line of layout applications and raster image processors, and it stores outlines rather than samples. On a business card nobody would notice the difference; on a van door or a three-metre banner, a traced outline and a stretched JPEG are recognisable from across the street.
What tracing cannot do is invent detail the JPEG never held. A logo saved 200 pixels wide under heavy compression comes back with the blocky corners that are genuinely there. So before converting anything, spend twenty minutes hunting for the largest copy in existence: an old attachment, the header image on the website, a file still sitting on the sign-maker's server.
Settings we suggest
Colours is the control that matters for this job. JPEG stores colour coarsely and smears it across the edges of its 8×8 blocks, so a logo drawn in four inks reaches you as thousands of near-identical shades with a pale halo hugging every letter. Ask for 40 colours and the tracer obliges: it draws that halo as a ring of thin slivers around the type, correct to the pixel and useless on press. Start at 6 to 10 for flat artwork, 2 for a single-colour mark.
Leave Shape stacking on Cut-outs. Stacked paints each colour as a full shape and lets the ones above cover it; cut-outs punches the upper shape out of the lower one, so every region is filled exactly once — which matters once a shop applies overprint or pulls separations. Draw style stays on Fill shapes; Stroke edges returns unfilled contours, a cutting file rather than artwork.
The file is EPSF-3.0, and the size in millimetres decides its BoundingBox: ask for 90 mm and the box is written as 256 points, that measurement turned into points and rounded up. Skip the field and the box is taken from the trace instead, so a 1200-pixel-wide logo becomes a 1200-point box. Images over 1.5 megapixels are downscaled before tracing, which is why an untyped phone photo of a sign gives a smaller box than its pixel count suggests.
Then check the EPS before it leaves your outbox. Place it, zoom to 800 per cent on a letter edge and look for a pale contour following the type; that is the halo, and the cure is another pass with fewer colours. Make sure the artwork sits inside the BoundingBox, and delete the white background rectangle if the logo has to sit on a colour.
Questions
The printer says my EPS is still not vector. What went wrong?
Usually the file was made by pushing a photo editor's canvas out as EPS, which wraps the same pixels in a new container. A traced EPS from here holds filled paths only. Zoom in hard to tell them apart: outlines stay crisp at any magnification, wrapped pixels go soft.
Why does my traced logo have a faint outline around the letters?
That is JPEG compression, not the tracer. Compression smears in-between colour along every hard edge, and at a high colour count those pixels form regions of their own. Convert again with fewer colours and the smear is absorbed into the colours either side.
Will the EPS keep the white background of the JPEG?
Yes. A JPEG cannot store transparency, so its white is a real colour and is traced like any other shape. Delete it in your layout, or trace from a PNG with an alpha channel: transparent areas count as outside the canvas and stay empty in the vector.
Can I make the EPS exactly 90 millimetres wide?
Yes. Type 90 and a matching height into the millimetre fields before converting and the BoundingBox comes back as 256 points — 90 mm, rounded up to the whole point. Leave them empty and the box is sized from the trace instead. The paths are curves either way, so the placed file still scales to 9 metres without losing an edge.
How large a JPEG can I send, and how long does it take?
Up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels, one image per conversion. Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line or noisy images take longer. If a conversion does not finish within 60 seconds it stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image.
Do I have to sign in to download the EPS?
Converting and previewing are free and watermark-free; a free Google sign-in unlocks 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 files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.