Turn a PNG into the vector file your print shop asked for

Almost nobody goes looking for a vector until somebody else demands one. The message comes from the sign shop, the screen printer, the embroidery digitiser or the laser cutting service, and it carries the same line: send us the vector. What sits in your folder is a PNG — the designer's export, or the mark cropped off an old business card.

The tracer rebuilds that picture as flat colour regions with fitted curves, then writes the same shapes out as SVG, PDF, EPS or DXF. Geometry is built once and each writer serialises it, so the EPS you send the printer and the DXF you load into cutting software describe identical outlines. Tick several boxes and a ZIP joins the download list.

Which one to hand over depends entirely on who asked, and their wording usually decides it. Below, each way of phrasing the request is matched to a format — along with what becomes of the transparent area around your logo, because a PNG's alpha channel is read as empty canvas and comes through as a genuine hole rather than a white box.

How it works

1. Upload your PNG — one image per conversion, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. JPEG and WEBP work the same way.
2. Set the colour count for the artwork in front of you: 2 for a single-colour mark, 8 to 16 for a flat logo, more for shaded illustration. The range is 2 to 64.
3. Tick the format the person who asked for a vector actually needs — SVG, PDF, EPS or DXF — and fill in width and height in millimetres if the job has a fixed physical measurement.
4. Check the preview and change the colour count if details merged or broke apart.
5. Sign in with Google (free) to download, then forward the file to whoever asked for it.

Who this is for

A PNG is a grid of coloured pixels. Enlarge it for a shopfront fascia, a 3 m banner or an embroidered chest logo and the grid shows: soft edges, stair-stepped diagonals, a grey halo where the anti-aliasing sat. A vector stores the boundary of every colour region as a path, so one file drives a 30 mm sticker and a vehicle wrap. That is why the shop keeps asking.

One trap is worth knowing before you send anything back. A file can carry an .svg extension and still be a PNG in costume: some converters wrap the bitmap in an SVG shell, the prepress operator opens it, sees a placed picture, and bounces the job a second time. The SVG written here holds path elements only, with no image element anywhere in it; the PDF is drawn with cubic curve operators rather than a pasted bitmap, and the EPS uses fill and stroke operators.

Two honest limits. PNG is offered as an output too, but that one is the finished vector rendered back to pixels on a transparent background — a tidied-up raster, useless as an answer to "send the vector". And the engine has no character recognition, so a wordmark returns as letter-shaped outlines rather than live type. Print shops usually prefer that, since no font travels with the file, but you cannot retype the tagline later.

Settings we suggest

Match the format to the sentence in the request. "Send an SVG" nearly always means a cutting machine or a web use, and it is what browsers, Figma and Inkscape open most cleanly. "Send an EPS" or "send a print-ready vector PDF" comes from presses, screen printers and sign makers. "Send a DXF" comes from anything with a motor: laser cutters, routers, plasma tables, CAD. In doubt, tick SVG and PDF together.

Colours is the one axis that changes the trace itself. Two gives a single clean silhouette, which is what cutters and machine shops want; 8 to 16 suits a flat brand mark; push toward 64 only for shaded work. Leave draw style on fill_shapes for solid artwork, since stroke_shapes and stroke_edges give outline drawings instead. Keep shape stacking on cut-outs so every colour is a closed shape with the overlaps removed — what a blade follows and what a screen printer separates. Group by colour only rearranges grouping inside the SVG.

For physical dimensions, fill in width and height in millimetres, 1 to 5000, and all four vector formats come out at that scale: the SVG and the DXF carry it in their geometry, the PDF and EPS in the page box, so a mark you asked for at 150 mm is a 150 mm page when prepress opens it. Left empty, 96 pixels map to 25.4 mm, so a 512-pixel logo lands near 135 mm across, and the PDF and EPS page is sized from the pixel dimensions instead. The DXF is R2010 (AC1024), read by AutoCAD 2010 and later, Fusion 360, LightBurn, Inkscape and FreeCAD; it carries outlines only, LWPOLYLINE runs plus degree-3 splines, one layer per colour. Coordinates sit at millimetre scale and the header says so ($INSUNITS = 4), so the machine software reads the size off the file rather than leaving you to pick a unit and hope.

Transparency is where PNG differs from the other inputs. Pixels with an alpha above 10 count as artwork; anything more transparent is treated as outside the canvas and never drawn, so the gap inside a ring, the counter of a letter O and the surround of a die-cut sticker all arrive as real holes. Partly transparent pixels, such as a soft shadow, are composited onto white first. Logos and stickers typically finish in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; a conversion still running at the 60 second budget stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image.

Questions

Related pages

• Convert a PNG into real SVG curves
• Turn a PNG into an EPS your print shop will accept
• Convert a PNG into a PDF that is made of curves
• PNG to DXF converter
• What happens to a transparent PNG when it becomes an SVG
• Vectorising an image, from upload to a result you can trust

Updated 2026-09-15