How to vectorize scans, sketches, and hand-drawn art

Capture the drawing well

Everything a scan gets wrong — shadows, grain, blur, a tilt — the tracer faithfully turns into shapes. Get the capture right and the rest is easy.

• A scanner beats a phone. A flatbed gives even light and no perspective distortion. Scan in color, even for black ink — it makes it easier to separate ink from yellowed paper — at 300 dpi for a letter or A4 page, or 600 dpi for a small sketch.
• Photographing it instead? Shoot straight down, in bright, even, indirect daylight. Skip the flash, keep your phone’s shadow off the page, and fill the frame with the drawing.
• Crop tight and save as PNG. Anything outside the artwork is noise, and JPEG compression adds more. The upload limit is 4 MB, and very large images are scaled down before tracing anyway — so crop to the drawing rather than uploading the whole page at high resolution.

Two minutes of prep

Optional, but it pays off with pencil and faint lines. In any photo editor — Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity Photo, or your phone’s built-in editor — use Levels or Curves to:

• push the paper to pure white,
• pull the lines towards black,
• and straighten the image if it’s tilted.

The cleaner the separation between line and paper, the fewer guesses the tracer has to make.

Ink and marker line art

Black ink on white paper is the easiest thing there is to trace well. Upload the scan, open Settings → Palette → Choose palette, and:

1. Slide Simplify Colors all the way down, to two colors: ink and paper.
2. Click the paper swatch and hide it. The paper becomes transparent, leaving just your lines — ready to drop onto any background.
3. If the ink should be true black, click its swatch and set it to #000000; scanned ink usually comes out as a dark gray.
4. Click Apply changes, then apply again in the settings to re-trace.

Turn on Refine curves to color edges (under Advanced → Detail) so line edges follow the ink rather than the pixel grid. Check the thinnest lines at 200% in Outlines over original; if they break up, the scan needs more resolution or more contrast.

Pencil sketches

Pencil is harder: the lines are gray, uneven in pressure, and grainy. The contrast prep above is the most effective fix. After that:

• Try three colors instead of two — paper, light pencil, dark pencil — and decide per swatch. Merge light into dark to keep the sketchy strokes, or hide it to keep only the confident lines.
• Raise Minimum area to absorb the graphite grain.
• Accept some loss. Soft shading has no edges, so it traces as blotches. If you want the shading, ink over the pencil and scan again.

Colored artwork

Colored-in drawings, markers, and watercolors behave like small illustrations. Choose a color count that matches the colors you actually used, merge the near-duplicates that paper texture and uneven fill create, and hide the paper. Watercolor washes have gradients inside them; for those, the Gradients draw style keeps a wash soft instead of splitting it into rings.

Scans of printed material

Scans of printed material — old flyers, packaging, a logo cut from a brochure — hide a problem: halftone. Print builds colors from tiny dots of ink, and a good scan captures every dot. Traced literally, a flat orange becomes thousands of dots.

• Use your scanning software’s descreen option if it has one, or blur the scan very slightly before uploading.
• Lower the color count so the dot pattern merges into one color.
• Raise Minimum area so the remaining dots dissolve into the color around them.

Dust, specks, and paper grain

Dust, hairs, paper fibres, and stray marks all become tiny shapes. Minimum area, under Advanced → Small regions, merges every region smaller than the number of pixels you set into its closest-colored neighbour. The default is 64; 128 or 256 clears heavier grime.

After the trace

Line art from a scan is usually on its way somewhere else:

• Cutting or engraving it? Single-stroke edges and real units matter — see making cut files.
• Turning lettering into a typeface? Make a font from your handwriting walks through it.
• Recoloring it later? Export with the Easy editing preset, so shapes arrive grouped by color.