Why naive tracing fails
Basic tracers follow colour boundaries pixel by pixel. On a compressed JPG, those boundaries are noisy, so you get thousands of tiny nodes, wobbling edges and stray specks of colour. It looks acceptable at thumbnail size and falls apart the moment someone scales it.
- Node bloat: hundreds of anchor points where four would do.
- Open paths that will not fill correctly in a cutter or plotter.
- Near-duplicate colours from JPG artefacts instead of flat brand colours.
What a production-grade conversion adds
Denoise and background removal first, then edge refinement, corner detection and curve smoothing, then colour quantisation into a small palette of flat spot colours. Finally, paths are closed and overlapping shapes are cleaned so fills behave predictably.
Which format to hand over
SVG is the web and cutter standard. EPS and AI are what most print shops and screen printers ask for. PDF is the safe universal handoff for signage. Export all four and you will never be asked to redo the file.
What vector conversion cannot fix
It cannot invent detail that was never captured, recreate a photographic gradient as flat spot colour without a design decision, or rescue a logo that was a 120px favicon. In those cases the honest answer is a redraw — and a good conversion gets you 90% of the way there before a human touches it.