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What does a photograph look like as shapes?

A photograph has no flat regions to find — every pixel is slightly its own colour. Vectron's Watershed mode splits it by where the colour changes fastest instead, which holds a picture together where ordinary colour clustering falls apart.

See it on an example
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Vectron's split view in Watershed mode: the original on the left, the traced regions on the right

Why a photograph behaves differently

Flat artwork gives a tracer something to hold onto: a region of one colour with an edge around it. A photograph gives it none of that. Grouping a photo by colour tends to produce bands and speckle, because the colours were never grouped to begin with.

Watershed works the other way round. It splits the picture into regions by where the colour changes fastest — closer to how an edge actually looks — and on a photograph or a soft-edged illustration it usually beats clustering by colour. On flat art it is usually worse, which is why it is a mode rather than the default.

Tracing a photo without it falling apart

Expect to spend the time on two controls rather than on all nine.

Start tracing
  1. 1
    Add the photograph
    PNG, JPEG, GIF, WEBP or BMP, up to 8000 × 8000.
  2. 2
    Switch to Watershed
    Under What should come out. This is the mode that exists for exactly this case.
  3. 3
    Set How much detail to keep
    Low gives poster-like blocks. High follows the photograph closely and starts picking up grain. The middle is where most photos want to be.
  4. 4
    Turn on No hairline gaps
    At high detail the regions stack, and pale seams appear where they meet. This covers them, for a few percent of file size.
  5. 5
    Compare with Fade
    Blending the trace over the original is the fastest way to see which features survived and which dissolved.
  6. 6
    Download the SVG
    Expect a bigger file than flat artwork gives you — a photograph is simply more shapes.

A photograph that survives as vectors

Decide what you are making first
A faithful trace and a bold poster are opposite ends of one slider. Knowing which one you want turns an hour of fiddling into two adjustments.
Watershed for photos, Full colour for flat art
They are not better and worse, they are for different pictures. If your image is somewhere between the two, try both and compare — it takes seconds.
Faces and text are the hard parts
Small features are where a trace shows. Refine an area over a face or a sign and give it more detail than the rest of the picture needs.
Big files are the honest cost
Thousands of regions means thousands of paths. If the SVG is unwieldy, take detail out deliberately rather than hoping a setting hides it.

Still wondering?

It works, with the understanding that vectorising approximates. You get layered shapes that read as the photograph rather than a pixel-perfect copy — closer to a screen print or a poster than to the original file.

A different way of deciding where one region ends and the next begins. Instead of grouping pixels that are a similar colour, it splits the picture where the colour changes fastest, which is much closer to where an edge actually is in a photograph.

Because it kept a lot of regions, and every region is geometry. Lower How much detail to keep. There is a warning in the app when the result crosses into unwieldy territory.

The regions are stacked and the browser antialiases each edge twice. Turn on No hairline gaps and they go — the app suggests it by itself once detail is high enough for the seams to show.

Yes — that is the low end of the detail slider, or the Poster preset in Full colour. Few colours, big bold shapes, a much smaller file.

Bringing something else to Vectron?

AI image to SVGLogo to SVG

Got that file open in another tab?

Drag it over. Worst case you’ve lost ten seconds and learned what your artwork looks like in vectors.

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