How to trace a picture into shapes in Paint by Zaweba

Somebody sends you their logo as a small, slightly fuzzy JPEG and asks for it on a banner. Scaling it up will only make the blur worse. Tracing it into shapes is the usual answer, and Paint by Zaweba has a built-in tracer for the job under Vector > Vectorise Bitmap.

It reads the picture, finds areas of colour and turns them into shape layers. Shapes stay sharp at any size, so the banner, the sticker and the business card can all come from the same trace.

The settings that matter

The dialog shows a live preview so you can see each change before committing. Colours sets how many separate colours the tracer looks for. A flat two-colour logo wants a small number; a cartoon with shading wants more. Too few and details merge, too many and you get dozens of tiny shapes for every faint shade of anti-aliasing.

Smoothing decides how much the tracer evens out wobbly edges. Raise it for scanned drawings with rough pencil lines, lower it when the original has crisp geometric edges you want to keep. Corner angle sets how sharp a bend has to be before it is treated as a corner rather than part of a curve, which matters a great deal for lettering: too high and the corners of an E go soft, too low and round letters pick up odd points.

Minimum area throws away specks smaller than the size you set. It is the quickest way to clean up dust, JPEG noise and stray dots.

Stacked or cut-out

You can choose stacked or cut-out output. Stacked lays shapes on top of each other, like layers of paper, so a white letter can sit on top of a blue disc. It tends to give simpler shapes with fewer gaps. Cut-out makes each colour a shape with holes where the others sit, so nothing overlaps. That is the better choice when you plan to cut the result on a vinyl or craft cutter, or to recolour one area without the others showing underneath.

Drop background removes the main background colour so the trace has nothing behind it. For logos on white, turn it on. There is also an option to write an SVG as well as the shape layers.

Size limits and what to expect

The tracer works on pictures up to 1600 pixels, with a 480 pixel preview. That is plenty for logos, icons and line drawings. Very large photos are not what a tracer is for in any case; a photo traced into shapes becomes a poster-style illustration rather than a faithful copy.

Give it the cleanest source you have. Crop to the logo first, straighten it, and if the background is grubby, a quick Levels or Threshold adjustment to push it towards pure white helps the tracer a lot.

After the trace

The result is ordinary shape layers, so every vector tool in the app applies. Use the Shape Builder to remove fragments, the Corner tool to sharpen up corners, Merge Shape Components to tidy a shape that came out in parts, and the colour tools to match the brand colours exactly. Text in a logo usually traces best when you treat it as shapes and then correct a letter or two by hand.

Mistakes to avoid with tracing

Do not trace at full colour and hope to tidy later; start with the fewest colours that still read correctly and add more only if needed. Watch the preview at different zoom levels, since a trace that looks fine at fit-to-screen may have ragged edges up close. And if a client can find their original artwork, use that. Tracing is a rescue, and Paint by Zaweba makes it a decent one, but it cannot recover detail that was never in the picture.