How to vectorize a logo from a low-resolution JPG
The most common request a vector tracer gets — and the one with the most ways to go wrong. Here is the settings recipe, and an honest account of what tracing can and cannot recover.
Why a JPG logo is harder than it looks
A logo starts life as clean flat colour with hard edges. By the time it reaches you as a small JPG pulled off a website, three things have happened to it, and each one fights the tracer.
Anti-aliasing. To make a curved edge look smooth on a pixel grid, the renderer blends the edge pixels between the logo colour and the background. A two-colour logo therefore arrives with dozens of intermediate colours smeared along every boundary. A tracer that treats those honestly will produce a halo of thin sliver shapes around each element.
JPEG compression. JPEG throws away detail in 8 × 8 pixel blocks and is at its worst exactly where logos live: sharp, high-contrast edges. The result is ringing — faint ripples of off-colour pixels echoing away from every edge — plus blocky discolouration in what should be solid fields. Zoom to 400% on your source and you will see it.
Scale. A 180-pixel-wide header logo has perhaps six pixels across a letter stroke. There is no algorithm that recovers a crisp letterform from six blurred pixels, because the shape of that letter is no longer in the file.
Before you start: find a better source
Five minutes here saves an hour of cleanup, and it is the single biggest factor in the result.
- Check for a favicon or app icon — often a clean PNG.
- Look at the site's press or media kit page. Companies frequently publish the real EPS, AI, or SVG there.
- Try the printed version. A letterhead, business card, or invoice scanned at 600 dpi beats a 200-pixel web JPG comfortably.
- Search for a larger copy of the same image. Reverse image search regularly turns up the 2000-pixel original.
- Prefer PNG over JPG if both exist — PNG has no ringing.
If a true vector original turns up, stop: you already have what tracing is trying to approximate.
The settings recipe
- Source Type → Flat Graphic — Signs, Logos, Text. The single most important setting on this page. Flat Graphic mode snaps to the image's actual flat colours and traces clean, simplified edges. Photo / Art mode does the opposite: it preserves organic contour and texture, which on a logo means it faithfully reproduces every compression artifact you were hoping to get rid of.
- Quality Level → 7 to 9. Higher levels work at a larger internal resolution, which is what keeps thin strokes and small text from breaking up. Go to 10 only if 9 is still losing detail; it is slower and adds shapes without always adding fidelity.
- Color Quantization → match the real logo. Count the colours the logo genuinely has, not the ones the JPG contains. Two-colour wordmark? Choose 4 tones. Three or four brand colours plus white? Choose 8. Setting this low is what collapses the anti-aliased halo back into solid colour. Reaching for 32 or 64 "to be safe" is the classic mistake — it preserves every artifact in high fidelity.
- Color Randomness → 0%. Brand colours must be exact. Any randomness at all is wrong here.
- Detail Distribution → Overall Detail. Logos need even treatment across the whole image. Center Detail deliberately simplifies the edges of the frame, which will soften elements sitting out near the border.
- Polygon Fill Size → raise it until the speckles go. This controls how aggressively tiny regions are merged. Start at the default, generate, and look at the flat areas. If you see confetti — little stray dots of off-colour left over from compression — raise it and generate again. Keep raising until the speckles disappear but before the corners of letters start rounding off. That threshold is the sweet spot.
- Paint Texture and Canvas Texture → Off. Both, always, for a logo. They exist to make artwork look hand-made, which is the exact opposite of what a brand mark needs.
Read the result at 100%, not zoomed out
A trace almost always looks perfect at thumbnail size. Zoom the Vector Output to full size and check the four places problems hide:
- Letterform interiors — the holes in a, e, o, and R. If they have filled in, raise Quality or lower Polygon Fill Size.
- Thin strokes — serifs and the light strokes of a script face are the first things to snap. Raise Quality.
- Corners — a rounded-off corner that should be square means Polygon Fill Size has gone too far. Back it off.
- Flat fields — any mottling or confetti means Color Quantization is too high, Polygon Fill Size too low, or both.
Finishing in a vector editor
Download the SVG and open it in Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, or Figma. Even a good trace benefits from ten minutes of cleanup:
- Replace the colours with the real brand values. Select each colour group and set the exact hex or Pantone. Traced colours are sampled from a compressed JPG and will be a shade or two off.
- Delete stray shapes. Select and remove any leftover specks in the background.
- Replace the text with live type if you can identify the typeface. Real text beats traced text at every size, and stays editable.
- Simplify paths if the node count is high — most editors have a path-simplify command with a tolerance slider.
What tracing cannot do
It cannot invent detail that the source no longer contains. From a 150-pixel-wide JPG you will get clean, scalable shapes whose outlines are approximations of the original curves — slightly soft where the original was crisp, slightly irregular where it was geometric. That is usually fine for internal use, a slide, or a comp. For a permanent brand asset that will be printed large, the honest path is to redraw the mark properly over the trace, using it as a template. The trace gets you 80% of the way in thirty seconds; the last 20% is hand work, and there is no tool that removes it.
One legal note
Vectorizing a logo does not give you any right to use it. Logos are trademarks and the artwork is usually copyrighted. Recreating your own company's mark, or a client's with their permission, is ordinary work; doing it with someone else's is not. If you are not sure you have the right to use the mark, ask the owner before you use the file.