What "flat" means to the tracer

A flat logo has a handful of solid colours and clean edges: a wordmark, a badge, an icon with two or three fills. This is the input the tracer handles best, because its first step is to reduce the picture to a fixed number of colours and its second step is to outline each colour as a shape. When the source already is a few solid colours, both steps have very little to guess.

The four controls

Preset. The Standard preset (internally logo) defaults to 6 colours and applies a conservative palette clean-up on noisy sources such as JPEGs. Cricut / Vinyl (icon) is the same pipeline with 8 colours as its starting point. Line art / Stencil (sketch) throws colour away entirely and traces a black-and-white threshold — useful for stamps and stencils, wrong for a coloured logo. Detailed artwork (detailed) starts at 16 colours and skips the clean-up.

Number of colours (2–24). The tracer reduces the image to this many colours with a median-cut quantiser and no dithering, then emits one path per colour. Count the colours you can see, add one for the background if it is not transparent, and start there. Too few and two similar fills merge into one shape; too many and anti-aliased edge pixels get their own thin, ragged paths.

Smooth curves. On, the mask of each colour is lightly blurred before tracing and Potrace's corner threshold is set so that gentle bends become curves. Off, every pixel step can become a corner, which is right for pixel art or deliberately jagged shapes and wrong for almost everything else.

Remove background. On, the tracer floods inward from the image edges and drops the connected outer region of the border colour. It never removes enclosed areas, so the white inside a letter or a badge survives. Leave it off for logos that already have a transparent background, and for logos whose background colour also appears inside the artwork touching the edge.

A working recipe

  1. Upload the largest, sharpest version of the logo you have. A 2000-pixel PNG traces far better than a 300-pixel one; tracing does not invent detail.
  2. Keep the Standard preset. Set colours to what you count (a two-colour wordmark on white: 3).
  3. Leave Smooth curves on.
  4. Turn on Remove background if the logo sits on a solid backdrop you do not want as a shape.
  5. Convert and open the preview at full size. Look at: the corners of letters (should be crisp, not rounded off), the thinnest strokes (should be continuous) and the palette strip (should list the colours you expected and nothing extra).
  6. If a colour is missing, raise the count by one and convert again. If there are stray speckle paths, lower it by one.

Previews are free, so iterating costs nothing but time; unlock only the version you keep.

When the result still looks wrong

  • Rounded corners on a geometric logo. Turn Smooth curves off for that image; the corner threshold is what rounds them.
  • Thin outline turned into a series of blobs. The stroke is only a pixel or two wide at the source resolution. Upload a larger original; there is no setting that restores it.
  • Background removed the inside of the letters too. That means the inside is connected to the edge somewhere (a broken outline). Turn removal off and delete the background path in the editor instead, or repair the outline in the source.
  • A gradient in the logo became stripes. Expected; see the guide on why photos and gradients posterise.