What converts well, and what doesn't

Every image below runs through the same tracer. The difference is entirely in the source artwork. Load any of them into the tool to see exactly what it does.

The tracer works by picking a brightness threshold and following the boundary between light and dark. That one sentence explains every example on this page: artwork with a clean light/dark split traces perfectly, and artwork without one cannot be rescued by any combination of settings.

These work

Traces well

Solid shapes with intended holes

Pure black on pure white, with shapes far thicker than a cutting kerf. There is exactly one correct threshold and every setting between 60 and 200 finds it.

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Traces well

Heavy line art

Monoline artwork is fine as long as the strokes are heavy. Each line becomes a closed loop with real width, so nothing falls below the minimum width you can cut.

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Traces well

Bold lettering

Heavy type with open counters. Watch for loose pieces, the middle of an O or A detaches when you cut around it. The tool outlines those in red so you can bridge them before cutting.

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These cause problems

A soft shaded sphere on a gradient background

Traces poorly

Photographs and soft shading

A gradient has no edge to find. Raise the threshold and the shape shrinks; lower it and the background joins in. This is the single most common reason a trace looks wrong, and no slider fixes it.

Fix: trace it by hand as a silhouette first, or use a high-contrast photo where the subject is genuinely dark against a genuinely light background.

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Traces poorly

Hairline strokes

Lines under about two pixels break into dashes at threshold time, and anything that does survive is narrower than your kerf, so the cutter removes the whole feature instead of cutting around it.

Fix: thicken the strokes in your drawing program before exporting, or use Thicken outer edges plus Enforce min. material width.

Load this example

Traces poorly

Low contrast or busy backgrounds

The star here is only slightly darker than the texture behind it. Any threshold that captures the star also captures half the background, and the result is hundreds of junk paths.

Fix: knock the background out to solid white first. Ten minutes in an image editor beats an hour of slider tweaking.

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A quick checklist

Property	Traces well	Causes trouble
Contrast	Solid dark on solid light	Gradients, shadows, soft edges
Resolution	1000–2000 px on the long edge	Under 400 px, or heavy JPEG artifacts
Line weight	Strokes at least 3–4 px	Hairlines and 1 px outlines
Background	Flat white, or transparent PNG	Textures, photos, watermarks
Colour	Black and white, or clearly separated tones	Similar brightness in different colours

Transparent PNGs are the easiest case of all. When the tool detects an alpha channel it traces from transparency instead of brightness, which sidesteps the contrast problem entirely. If your artwork is a logo with a transparent background, export it that way and skip the threshold slider.

On colour: two different colours can have identical brightness, a mid red and a mid green often do. The tracer sees brightness, not hue, so those merge into one blob. Convert to greyscale first to see what the tool will see.

Ready to try your own? Open the tracer, the first three exports are free, and tracing and previewing are always unlimited.