Turn a PNG into a Glowforge-ready SVG
A laser does not care what your artwork is called. It cares whether there is anything in the file it can follow. A path it can travel along is a candidate for cutting or scoring; an area that reads as a filled region is a candidate for engraving. Hand a Glowforge a PNG and there is no path in it at all, so engraving is the only operation left.
Converting to SVG hands the choice back. This tool rebuilds the drawing rather than repackaging it — a geometric tracer working by colour segmentation, an explicit model of the anti-aliased edge, and curve fitting — and what you download is path elements and nothing else. Whether those paths arrive as bare outlines or as filled areas is the draw style setting: the cut-or-score versus engrave question, answered before you upload.
Colour is the second lever, because a loaded design is assigned operations one group at a time and colour is what those groups fall out of. Convert at 26 colours and you have 26 decisions waiting; convert at three and you have a plan. SVG is also what separates this page from the laser-cutting, CNC and plasma ones nearby, written for controllers that import DXF.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Decide the operation first: an outline for the machine to follow, or a filled area for it to burn into the surface.
- Upload one PNG, JPEG or WEBP — one image per conversion, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels.
- Set draw style to Stroke edges or Stroke shapes for outlines, or Fill shapes for engraving, and keep the colour count as low as the design allows.
- Type the finished width and height into the millimetre fields so the SVG carries a real-world size.
- Check the preview, sign in with Google (free), download the .svg, then assign an operation to each colour once the file is loaded.
Who this is for
Most artwork that ends up on a laser bed was never drawn for one: a client sends a logo as a PNG because that is what the brand folder holds, a badge design turns up as a screenshot. Both engrave happily, and that is where a surprising number of projects stop — not because the burn looks bad, but because engraving was the only door open.
The three jobs people have in mind are not interchangeable. A shape that must fall out of a sheet of plywood or acrylic needs a closed contour for the head to travel around. A fold line or a registration mark needs the same kind of path, treated more gently. A logo burned into a lid needs an area, not a line. One PNG can serve all three, but only once it has the outlines and the fills to serve them with.
Settings we suggest
Draw style matters most here. Stroke edges keeps only the boundaries between colour regions — the leanest line drawing available, for when everything should be followed rather than filled. Stroke shapes also returns outlines, but each region arrives as its own closed contour — the better pick when a piece must drop out of the sheet. Fill shapes, the default, turns each colour region into a filled path: the engrave version of the same artwork.
Only one draw style applies per conversion, so a design needing both is two conversions, assembled in an editor before upload. One quirk of Fill shapes: a 0.7 px seam stroke also runs along each shape so neighbouring colour areas meet without a hairline gap — filled artwork, with strokes in it.
Colours decides how many operations you assign later: treat it as a plan, not a quality dial. Two gives one boundary, the silhouette; three or four cover a cut contour plus an interior mark to engrave. The slider reaches 64, but a high count splits the soft anti-aliased ramp around every PNG edge into a colour of its own — the usual reason an outline returns as two lines a hair apart. The colour count is the only edge control there is.
Leave shape stacking on Cut-outs, so a hole is subtracted from the shape around it and the middle of a letter O stays open; set Group by to Colour so a whole operation is selectable in one click. Then fill in the millimetre fields: width and height in mm are applied to SVG, so the artwork arrives at the size you meant rather than at 96 px = 25.4 mm on the traced pixel grid, which is smaller than your original since images above 1.5 megapixels are downscaled first.
Questions
Why convert at all — can a Glowforge not engrave the PNG directly?
It can, and if engraving is all you want, a raster is a legitimate thing to send. The conversion buys the other two operations: cutting and scoring need a path to follow, and a PNG holds only pixels.
Which draw style corresponds to cut, score and engrave?
Outlines for anything the machine follows, fills for anything it burns into a surface. Stroke edges for the boundary network between colours, Stroke shapes when each region needs its own closed loop, Fill shapes for engraving. The setting labels nothing cut or score — it decides whether the file offers a line or an area.
How do I keep the cut parts and the engraved parts apart?
With colour, decided before you convert. Because operations are grouped by colour, your palette is your operation list: one flat colour for everything to be cut, another for everything to be engraved, then a matching colour count — two, three or four, not 26.
What happens to a transparent background?
It stays empty, and that matters here: no background rectangle is written, so nothing invites the machine to engrave the whole board. Pixels with an alpha value above 10 count as the picture, the rest is outside the canvas, and partly transparent pixels are flattened onto white — as is the 800 px preview, so pale artwork can look blank there.
What does it cost, how long does it take, and what happens to my upload?
It is free and adds no watermark. Preview first; downloading the vector files takes a free Google sign-in — 10 conversions an hour signed out, 60 an hour and 300 a day signed in. Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements, fine-line or noisy images longer; past 60 seconds a conversion stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image. Download links expire after 1 hour; uploads and generated files go by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.