PNG to SVG in Photoshop or Illustrator: what actually works

This is the rare workflow where knowing what a tool cannot do saves more time than any tutorial: of the design apps people try first, only one actually converts pixels to vectors. Illustrator does it properly. Photoshop, GIMP and Figma — despite a decade of tutorials implying otherwise — need outside help. Here is the honest version for each.

1. Photoshop: there is no trace

Photoshop has no Image Trace. Its vector features — shape layers, the pen tool, vector masks — vectorize things you draw, not pixels you already have, and its old SVG export never traced anything either. The often-shared workaround is a silhouette hack: make a selection (Select Subject, or a Threshold adjustment plus the magic wand), turn it into a work path from the Paths panel, and export the path. It produces one single-colour outline whose quality depends on a tolerance value you set blind.

That hack is worth it only when the silhouette is the deliverable — a cutting file, a stencil. For an actual logo or icon conversion, use a real tracer and spend the saved half hour on the result.

2. Illustrator: Image Trace, done properly

Illustrator is the tool those Photoshop tutorials were reaching for. The workflow: place the PNG (File → Place), select it, and run Image Trace from the Properties panel or Window → Image Trace. Start from a preset that matches the artwork — Black and White Logo for single-colour marks, one of the limited-colour presets for flat multi-colour logos — rather than the photo-oriented default.

Three sliders do most of the work: Paths (how tightly curves follow the pixels), Corners (how eagerly angles become anchor points) and Noise (the minimum speck size that survives). When the preview looks right, Expand converts the live trace to real editable paths — until you expand, there are no paths to export. Then File → Export → Export As → SVG. The result tends to carry more anchor points than it needs; a pass through the SVG Optimizer trims the coordinates without changing the shapes.

3. GIMP: pair it with a tracer

GIMP, like Photoshop, has no built-in raster-to-vector trace. The classic Unix answer is potrace, which wants a 1-bit input:

# threshold to black & white, then trace to SVG
magick logo.png -threshold 60% logo.pbm
potrace logo.pbm -s -o logo.svg

It is superb at line art and silhouettes — and monochrome only. If a command line isn't the comfortable place, Inkscape's Trace Bitmap is the same potrace engine with a preview, also free.

4. Figma: plugins or paste

Figma imports and edits SVG natively but ships no raster tracer — a placed PNG stays a PNG. The options are a community plugin (search the plugin library for "trace" or "vectorize"; most run the same class of algorithm described here) or tracing outside and pasting the result in, which Figma accepts as first-class vector layers. The second route keeps you in control of the trace settings and works without granting a plugin access to the file.

5. Without any of them

When the task is "this PNG needs to be an SVG by lunch" and no licence, install or plugin is at hand, the in-browser PNG to SVG converter covers the same ground as the limited-colour Image Trace presets: full-colour posterised tracing with a colour-count slider, running locally so the artwork is never uploaded. What no tracer of any price recovers — editable text, clean gradients, the original construction — is catalogued in what tracing can and cannot recover, which is worth two minutes before judging any tool's output.