Why Your SVG Trace Looks Jagged or Lumpy, and How to Fix It

Updated October 12, 2026 · 2 min read

A bad trace usually comes from the source image or two settings, not from the tool being broken. Find your symptom below.

Edges look wobbly or lumpy

The tracer treats every step between pixels as an edge. Small images have big steps. Two fixes:

Raise Smoothing so small bumps merge into curves.
Raise Soften so the image is slightly blurred before tracing.

If you can find a larger copy of the image, that fixes it better than any setting.

There are tiny specks and dots everywhere

That is compression noise or dust from a scan. Raise Remove small specks until they disappear, and lower the color count so fewer small shapes survive.

Thin lines break up or vanish

Lines only a pixel or two wide are hard to hold. Lower the speck filter, lower Smoothing a notch, and in black and white mode raise the threshold so fainter strokes count as ink.

Colors look flat or banded

Tracing makes flat color areas, so gradients become bands. More colors make smoother bands but a heavier file. If you need a true gradient, trace first and rebuild the gradient in your vector editor.

A white box sits behind my logo

Tick Make white background transparent. For a signature or line art, use the black and white style, which leaves the background out entirely.

The corners are rounded off

High smoothing rounds corners. Lower it, or set a slightly higher color count so the corners are not averaged away.

JPGs trace worse than PNGs

JPG compression adds halos around edges. That is why our JPG to SVG page suggests raising Soften first. It is the single most useful setting for JPG sources.

Once the trace looks right, check the file size with this guide.

TagsTracing SVGJPG