A cut file made of smooth vector shapes gives clean cut lines, keeps its size, and needs no background clean-up in Design Space. This page traces your PNG or JPG into such an SVG with the Shapes to cut settings: smooth outlines, few nodes, specks dropped and no background.
How to make a cut file for Cricut
- Upload the picture: a silhouette, a quote, a logo or a drawing with clear edges.
- Keep Shapes to cut. The design is traced as one colour; the paper is never part of it.
- Under More options the size unit is inches. Type the Width you want, for example 4, and the height follows. You can still resize the design in Design Space.
- Download the SVG. In Design Space choose Upload, then Upload Image, and pick the file.
Designs with several colours
For layered vinyl or cardstock, choose Logo or icon (flat colours) and tick Leave out the
background colour. All shapes of one colour are one path in the SVG, so Design Space lists one
layer per colour. Keep Layering on Cut-out: the colours then fit together edge to edge instead of being
stacked, which saves material. To match your vinyl colours, list them under Use only these
colours, for example #000000, #ffffff, #c8102e.
Getting clean cuts
- Specks: dust and stray pixels smaller than 25 square pixels are left out. Raise the value under More options if tiny pieces remain; they are hard to weed.
- Smoothness: raise Smoothness (for example to 1.5) for rounder, simpler outlines and fewer cuts; lower it to follow the picture more closely.
- Lettering: thin script fonts trace well only from a large, sharp picture. Very thin parts may tear when weeding; thicken them before tracing if you can.
- Wrong part traced: if the tracing shows the background instead of your design (this can happen when the design touches the edges of the picture), tick Swap drawing and background under More options.
Check before cutting
The result page shows your picture next to the tracing. Look for missing pieces, joined letters and leftover specks before you upload the file; changing a setting and tracing again only takes a few seconds.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Image Vectorizer.