What to expect from a traced photo
A photo has no edges in the sense a logo does. Color changes continuously — across a cheek, through a sky, along a shadow — and almost every pixel differs slightly from its neighbours. A vector is built from regions of flat color with hard boundaries. So tracing a photo is always a translation: you decide how smooth tone becomes shapes, and the look of the result follows from that decision.
That makes photo tracing closer to illustration than to conversion. A four-color trace of a portrait isn’t a failed copy of the photo; it’s a poster. Treat it that way and the settings get much easier to choose.
Decide on the look first
Three questions narrow it down quickly:
- Where will it be used? Screen printing, vinyl, and laser engraving need a few flat colors. A large print or a stylised illustration can carry many more.
- How heavy can the file be? Every extra color adds shapes, and a photo traced with dozens of colors can run to tens of thousands of paths — heavy for a web page and slow in an editor.
- Should it look like the photo, or like art made from it? The answer decides everything below.
Bold and graphic: 3 to 8 colors
A handful of colors gives the strongest, most graphic result — think screen-printed gig posters and pop-art portraits. In the palette editor (Settings → Palette → Choose palette), slide Simplify Colors down until the main forms read clearly: light side, shadow side, hair, background.
Then take charge of the colors themselves. Traced colors are averages of the photo and often come out muddy; click a swatch and replace it with a deliberate choice — a navy and cream duotone, say — and the result starts to look designed rather than processed. Hide any color that’s only background.
Detailed: many more colors
For a trace that still reads as the photo, keep many more colors. The automatic palette balances accuracy against the number of paths and is a sensible starting point; move Simplify Colors up from there if skin tones or skies look blotchy.
Expect a large file — detail in a photo is thousands of small regions, and each one is a shape. If it’s too heavy, merge similar colors in the palette editor instead of lowering the count everywhere: merge where nobody will notice (a busy background) and keep colors where everyone will (a face).
Smooth: the Gradients draw style
The biggest weakness of a flat-color trace is banding: a smooth sky breaks into visible stripes. The Gradients draw style, under Advanced → Shape output, tackles that head-on. Wherever a region is better described by a linear or radial gradient than by a single color, it’s filled with one — so skies, shadowed walls, and the curve of a cheek stay soft.
- Gradients are drawn in SVG, PDF, and EPS. DXF has no gradients, so each region falls back to its average color.
- Gradient ramps can bring in colors that aren’t in your palette — that’s how they stay smooth. If you must hold a strict set of colors, for spot-color printing for example, stay with Filled.
Isolate the subject
Most photos contain far more than you want to keep. Switch on Remove background in the Palette section of the settings and the background is cut out before tracing: it gets no colors and no paths, so the whole palette goes to the subject. That alone often makes the file dramatically smaller and every remaining color count for more.
Crop before you upload, too. The tighter the frame, the more of the tracer’s resolution goes to the part that matters.
Clean up the speckle
Photos — JPGs especially — are full of tiny variations that trace into specks: noise in the shadows, compression artifacts, fine texture. Minimum area, under Advanced → Small regions, merges every region smaller than the value you set into its closest-colored neighbour. Raise it step by step — 32, 64, 128 — until the speckle is gone but the details you care about, such as eyes and highlights, remain.
When not to vectorize a photo
Vectorizing is the wrong tool when you only need a photo bigger or sharper. A trace doesn’t recover detail from a photo; it replaces detail with shapes. For a large print of a photograph, start from the highest-resolution original you can get, or use an upscaler built for photos.
Vectorize a photo when you want what vectors are good at: a graphic style, a limited set of colors, a file that cuts, engraves, or prints in spot colors, or artwork you can edit shape by shape. For the background, read raster vs. vector images; to try it, drop a photo in and start with the color count.