Vector color separation: each ink as its own traced path

Where vector plates earn their place

A raster plate is tied to the resolution you rendered it at. Enlarge it and the edges soften; output it to film below your device resolution and lettering picks up stair-steps. A traced plate has no such ceiling — the same file drives a 4-inch left-chest print and a 14-inch back print with identical edge quality. It is also the only output a vinyl cutter, a Cricut, or a laser can actually use, since those machines follow paths, not pixels. If your job is a logo, lettering, or flat illustration, vector plates are usually the better deliverable.

And where they are the wrong idea

Tracing a photograph is a bad plan. Continuous tone has no edges to trace, so a tracer invents thousands of them and produces a file that is slower, larger and less faithful than the raster it came from. The same applies to halftoned plates: a dot grid traced to vector becomes tens of thousands of tiny circles for no benefit whatsoever. Vector tracing here is offered for flat plates, which is where it helps. For tonal work use index or simulated process and keep the plates raster — that is not a limitation, it is the right answer.

How the trace works

Separation happens first, in color space, using the same perceptual clustering the spot separator uses — so an ink is one plate wherever it appears in the design. Each flat plate is then traced individually to paths. That ordering matters: tracing the composite first and separating the resulting shapes afterwards, which is what a general-purpose auto-trace forces you into, produces overlapping stacked shapes that do not correspond to screens. Here the plate is the unit, and each plate comes out as its own SVG in register with the others.

What you get, and what opens it

One SVG per ink plus a manifest recording the ink colors and geometry, alongside the raster plates from the same render. The SVGs open in Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape and Affinity Designer, and drop straight into cutter software. If you would rather stay raster, the same render still gives you PNG plates, film output, and a multichannel PSD — the vector trace is an addition to the deliverable, not a different product you have to choose between.

Free separation, paid trace

Load the art and separate it in your browser for free, with no account and no upload — you will know within seconds whether the plates are clean, which is the part worth checking before you spend anything. The vector trace runs as part of the server-side print-ready render at 10 credits per image, with free re-renders while you adjust the ink count or tolerance and re-trace. Credits come from a plan starting at $8.50 a month for 600, or a $9 top-up for 500 that never expire. No watermarks on any output, ever.

It also unlocks the cutting work

Layered vector output is not only a screen-print deliverable. The same per-ink SVG plates are exactly what layered vinyl, Cricut and laser projects need: one path set per material color, in register, ready to cut. If you came here from cutting rather than printing, the separation logic is identical — you are just calling the inks materials, and the choke control that stops an underbase peeking out is the same control that stops two layers of vinyl fighting for the same millimetre.

Clean the art before you trace it

Tracing quality is decided before the tracer runs. A JPEG that has been emailed around a shop four times carries compression noise along every edge, and a tracer will faithfully reproduce that noise as wobble in the path. Two things help, and both are free and in the browser: raise the tolerance so near-identical colors collapse into one ink instead of fragmenting an edge into speckle, and merge inks in the list until the plate count matches what you will actually cut or burn. If the artwork has a background you do not want, remove it first — the same editor does that in one click — because a traced background is thousands of paths you will spend longer deleting than you saved. Look at the free raster plates first: if they look clean, the trace will be clean, and if they look ragged, no tracer will rescue them.