Convert JPG to DXF
Trace a JPEG to a cuttable DXF outline in your browser, at a width you set in millimetres. Best on high contrast artwork rather than photographs.
Trace your image
Open the drawing workspace, choose your image, and set the threshold and the width. The file stays in your browser.
What this keeps and what it drops
Kept
- The boundary your brightness threshold draws, holes included
- The proportions of the image, scaled to the width you set
- A closed outline per shape, ready to cut
Dropped
- Colour, shading and anything between solid and empty
- Detail finer than the 256 pixel trace
- Smooth edges, because the outline follows pixel boundaries
You choose the threshold and the width, so there is no single result to measure. What is fixed is where the outline comes from and how coarse it can be.
What tracing does
A JPEG is a grid of coloured pixels. A DXF is a set of lines a machine can follow. The workspace decides, for every pixel, whether it belongs to the shape, and then draws the boundary between what does and what does not.
You control that with the brightness threshold. Everything darker becomes solid, and inverting the test picks the light areas instead. Nudging the threshold is the first thing to try when an outline comes out wrong.
JPEG has one habit worth knowing
It was designed for photographs, so it smooths hard edges to save space. Around black lettering on white you get a halo of intermediate greys, and the threshold has to land somewhere inside that halo. The outline can come out slightly fatter or thinner than the original stroke, and a heavily compressed file can leave visible ripples along an edge.
None of that stops a bold shape from tracing well. It does mean a scan of a pencil sketch will trace better after you raise its contrast, and that a logo you have as PNG or SVG is worth using instead.
Set the size while you are here
An image carries no physical size, so give the workspace a width in millimetres and the height follows from the image's proportions. After the trace you have an ordinary drawing, so you can measure it, convert its units, or resize it to a target dimension before exporting.
What comes out
One closed outline per shape, on a single layer, in millimetres, with holes preserved. Straight runs are merged rather than emitted one line per pixel. The trace runs at 256 pixels on the longest edge and the boundary follows pixel edges, so it is stepped: about 0.4 mm per step on a 100 mm job.
For exact outlines at any size, trace from vector art with SVG to DXF instead.
Limits
Images are limited to 25 MiB, 4 million pixels and 8,192 pixels on either side, and are traced at 256 pixels on the longest edge. JPEG compression softens hard edges, so an outline can sit slightly inside or outside the original stroke.