JPG to SVG
.jpg · .jpeg
10 MB max
no alpha channel
JPEG throws away exactly the information a vectoriser needs: crisp edges and flat colour regions. Handle that first and the conversion is straightforward — full colour, editable paths, grouped by ink. This page is about handling it first.
Free credit to start · no card required · full colour, not a two-tone threshold
What compression did
What happens
JPEG stores frequency, not pixels. A sharp black-on-white edge picks up a faint halo of lighter and darker pixels either side of it.
What to do
Raise contrast before uploading so the edge snaps back to two values. A levels adjustment does more for the result than any converter setting.
What happens
Large areas of one colour break into faintly different square tiles at low quality settings, which reads as texture where there should be none.
What to do
If you have the original PNG, TIFF or design file, use that instead. A re-saved JPEG never recovers what the first save discarded.
What happens
JPEG cannot store transparency, so your artwork arrives sitting on an opaque background — usually white — that is now part of the image.
What to do
Crop tight and say so in the prompt field: describing the subject helps separate it from the background it is baked onto.
What happens
Chroma is stored at half resolution in most JPEGs, so coloured edges are softer than the luminance edges beside them.
What to do
Expect thin coloured outlines to be the least faithful part of the conversion. Restore them as strokes in the editor rather than fighting the source.
Workflow
Nobody wants to hear that the fix happens somewhere else. But the difference between step two done and step two skipped is the difference between a usable file and a smudge.
Every re-save compounds the loss. A 4000px original beats an 800px version that has been through three messaging apps, even if both look fine on screen.
Two minutes in any photo editor. Push the black point down and the white point up until the shapes read as solid regions rather than gradients.
Margin becomes empty viewBox, and background becomes shapes you will delete later. Crop first.
Lower detail for a mark or badge, higher for illustration. Higher detail costs two credits and produces more shapes, not necessarily a better result.
Delete the background rectangle if one came through, snap fills to your real palette, and rename the groups before you export.
Expectations
| Source | Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flat logo saved as JPG | Excellent | Effectively the same result as a PNG once contrast is corrected. |
| Scanned line drawing | Good | Clean line work if the scan is high contrast and the paper texture is removed. |
| Screenshot of a graphic | Good | Fine for shapes. Re-set any text as live type instead of vectorising it. |
| Product photo on plain white | Fair | You get a stylised silhouette, not a faithful reproduction. |
| Portrait or landscape photo | Poor | Continuous tone has no shapes to rebuild. Generate fresh artwork instead. |
The other routes
Two of the most common answers to this question are desktop applications, and on some jobs they are the right answer. Here is an honest read on when each one wins.
Free, offline, and genuinely capable if you are willing to learn the threshold, speckle and smoothing sliders. Expect a lot of nodes and a flat pile of paths — but you keep total control, and it costs nothing but time.
Best when you want offline, or you enjoy tuning the trace yourself.
The most controllable option if you already pay for it. The Logo and Sketched Art presets do most of the work; Expand turns the preview into real paths you can edit.
Best when Illustrator is already open and the file is going into a print workflow.
Reads the artwork and draws it again as closed shapes grouped by colour rather than following edges pixel by pixel, so you get tens of paths instead of hundreds and a layer tree you can read. The trade is exactness: this interprets your image where the two above copy it.
Best when you want an editable file rather than an afternoon of node cleanup.
Questions
Including the two that decide whether you keep the file: does it come back in colour, and what happened to the background.
One free credit. You will know within a minute whether the source is salvageable.
Convert a JPG