Procreate is a raster-only app, so it cannot convert an image to vector on its own. To vectorize Procreate art, export it as a PNG with a transparent background, trace it in a vector tool such as Adobe Capture, Illustrator's Image Trace, Affinity Designer, or Linearity Curve, and save the result as SVG or AI. Clean black line work traces best, and color art traces best when it is split into one layer per color first.

Why Procreate can't vectorize on its own

Procreate works in pixels. Every brush stroke, text layer, and fill is baked into a bitmap, so there are no anchor points, paths, or Bezier handles to export. Anything that needs to scale cleanly, such as a logo, an icon set, or shapes you plan to animate, has to pass through a tracing step in another app.

Tracing is automatic edge detection. The software reads contrast in your pixels and builds paths around it, so it works best when the source is unambiguous. Expect to clean up the result, because no auto-trace is perfect.

Prepare the artwork before you export

Most bad traces come from bad source files. A few minutes of prep in Procreate saves a lot of node cleanup later.

• Use smooth brushes. Monoline and Studio Pen-style brushes produce clean edges. Textured brushes like dry ink create ragged edges that the tracer turns into too many broken anchor points.
• Work at a generous canvas size. More pixels give the tracer cleaner curves to follow, but extreme resolutions can make the trace heavy and slow. Aim for the size you would actually print or composite at.
• Hide the background layer. In the Canvas settings, turn off Background Color so the export has real transparency.
• Separate by color. If the piece has multiple flat colors, put each color on its own layer so you can export and trace them individually.
• Increase contrast on line work. For ink drawings, make the lines solid black. Gray anti-aliased edges are fine, but faint sketch lines will trace as noise.

Export through Actions (the wrench icon) > Share > PNG. Use PNG rather than JPEG so you keep transparency and avoid compression artifacts around edges.

Method 1: Adobe Capture on iPad (free, best for line work)

Adobe Capture is the quickest option if you want to stay on the iPad. It needs a free Adobe account.

1. Save your PNG to the Camera Roll or Files.
2. Open Adobe Capture and import the image.
3. Choose the Shapes mode.
4. Adjust the threshold slider until the line weight matches your drawing. Turn on the smoothing option if edges look jittery.
5. Save the result to your Creative Cloud Library.
6. Open the library asset in Illustrator, or export it as SVG to bring into Affinity Designer or another editor.

This approach works best for black-and-white art such as lettering, monoline icons, and simple illustrations. It is less suited to detailed, multicolor paintings.

Method 2: Illustrator Image Trace (best for color and control)

If you have Illustrator on a desktop, Image Trace gives you the most control.

1. Place the PNG into a new Illustrator document.
2. Select it and open Image Trace.
3. Pick a preset that matches the art, and try a few to see which suits it best.
4. Open the advanced options and adjust the settings until the trace follows your lines cleanly. Make sure the background comes through as transparent.
5. Check the result to see what the paths actually look like.
6. Expand the trace to turn it into editable paths.

For multicolor artwork, tracing each color layer separately usually produces cleaner shapes than a single multicolor trace. You can then recolor, group, and stack them to rebuild the original look.

Method 3: Affinity Designer, Linearity Curve, and other vector apps

You don't need Adobe to do this. Affinity Designer and Linearity Curve can both work with Procreate exports. In Curve, the usual workflow is to export a PNG from Procreate, import it, run Auto Trace, then refine the paths and export to SVG, PDF, PNG, or AI. Affinity Designer is also a common place to open and tweak SVGs that come out of Adobe Capture.

Pick based on where you want to finish the job: iPad-only, Mac, or a desktop pipeline. The tracing quality depends more on your source art than on the app.

Handling color artwork

Auto-trace is most reliable with limited palettes. For full-color paintings with gradients, soft brushes, and texture, a trace will either posterize the image or create a huge pile of tiny overlapping shapes.

Better options:

• Rebuild in layers. Separate flat color areas in Procreate, export each as its own PNG, trace them one at a time, then stack them in your vector app.
• Trace the line art only. Trace the black linework as vector and re-create the fills with simple vector shapes underneath.
• Reduce the palette first. Posterize or simplify colors before tracing, so the tracer isn't guessing at gradients.
• Accept the limits. If the piece depends on grain, wet edges, or paint texture, a vector version will not look the same. Keep it as raster.

Clean up the traced paths

Whatever tool you use, inspect the result before it goes any further.

• Zoom in and look for stray specks, tiny islands, and jagged corners.
• Delete unneeded anchor points and simplify paths where the count is excessive.
• Check for white boxes or background shapes the tracer left behind.
• Merge or group related shapes, and name layers sensibly. This pays off when you move the file into other tools.
• Confirm that closed shapes are actually closed if you plan to fill or stroke them.

A lighter, simpler path set is easier to animate and renders faster.

Bring the vector into your motion pipeline

Once you have a clean file, you can take it into your other design, motion, or 3D tools. Keep the traced shapes in logical groups, since that structure becomes your layer organization. Complex traces with thousands of points can create messy results downstream, so simplify paths before doing anything heavy with them.

Whenever possible, bring in the vector and render at final output size, rather than upscaling a PNG later.

When vectorizing isn't the right move

Sometimes the goal isn't scalability. It's animating a Procreate piece while keeping its hand-made look. Tracing can flatten that character: brush texture, pressure variation, and subtle color shifts get lost, and the result can look like a clean, generic vector.

In that case, a raster-based workflow can serve you better.

A practical split: vectorize assets you need to scale, extrude, or rig as shapes, and keep textured illustrations as raster that you animate and finish in your compositor.

Quick troubleshooting

• Trace looks blobby: Raise the threshold or use a higher-resolution export.
• Too many nodes: Adjust the trace settings, or simplify after tracing.
• White background came through: Export with a transparent background, or adjust the trace settings to drop the white.
• Thin lines disappear: Redraw them slightly thicker or lower the threshold.
• Colors merged together: Trace each color layer separately.

Summary

Procreate can't create vector files, but it works well as the drawing stage in a vector workflow. Draw with smooth brushes, export a clean transparent PNG, trace with Adobe Capture, Illustrator, Affinity, or Curve, and tidy the paths. Then take the result into your motion or 3D tools. When the texture of the original matters more than scalability, keep the art raster.

Procreate is a raster-only app, so it cannot convert an image to vector on its own. To vectorize Procreate art, export it as a PNG with a transparent background, trace it in a vector tool such as Adobe Capture, Illustrator's Image Trace, Affinity Designer, or Linearity Curve, and save the result as SVG or AI. Clean black line work traces best, and color art traces best when it is split into one layer per color first.

Why Procreate can't vectorize on its own

Procreate works in pixels. Every brush stroke, text layer, and fill is baked into a bitmap, so there are no anchor points, paths, or Bezier handles to export. Anything that needs to scale cleanly, such as a logo, an icon set, or shapes you plan to animate, has to pass through a tracing step in another app.

Tracing is automatic edge detection. The software reads contrast in your pixels and builds paths around it, so it works best when the source is unambiguous. Expect to clean up the result, because no auto-trace is perfect.

Prepare the artwork before you export

Most bad traces come from bad source files. A few minutes of prep in Procreate saves a lot of node cleanup later.

• Use smooth brushes. Monoline and Studio Pen-style brushes produce clean edges. Textured brushes like dry ink create ragged edges that the tracer turns into too many broken anchor points.
• Work at a generous canvas size. More pixels give the tracer cleaner curves to follow, but extreme resolutions can make the trace heavy and slow. Aim for the size you would actually print or composite at.
• Hide the background layer. In the Canvas settings, turn off Background Color so the export has real transparency.
• Separate by color. If the piece has multiple flat colors, put each color on its own layer so you can export and trace them individually.
• Increase contrast on line work. For ink drawings, make the lines solid black. Gray anti-aliased edges are fine, but faint sketch lines will trace as noise.

Export through Actions (the wrench icon) > Share > PNG. Use PNG rather than JPEG so you keep transparency and avoid compression artifacts around edges.

Method 1: Adobe Capture on iPad (free, best for line work)

Adobe Capture is the quickest option if you want to stay on the iPad. It needs a free Adobe account.

1. Save your PNG to the Camera Roll or Files.
2. Open Adobe Capture and import the image.
3. Choose the Shapes mode.
4. Adjust the threshold slider until the line weight matches your drawing. Turn on the smoothing option if edges look jittery.
5. Save the result to your Creative Cloud Library.
6. Open the library asset in Illustrator, or export it as SVG to bring into Affinity Designer or another editor.

This approach works best for black-and-white art such as lettering, monoline icons, and simple illustrations. It is less suited to detailed, multicolor paintings.

Method 2: Illustrator Image Trace (best for color and control)

If you have Illustrator on a desktop, Image Trace gives you the most control.

1. Place the PNG into a new Illustrator document.
2. Select it and open Image Trace.
3. Pick a preset that matches the art, and try a few to see which suits it best.
4. Open the advanced options and adjust the settings until the trace follows your lines cleanly. Make sure the background comes through as transparent.
5. Check the result to see what the paths actually look like.
6. Expand the trace to turn it into editable paths.

For multicolor artwork, tracing each color layer separately usually produces cleaner shapes than a single multicolor trace. You can then recolor, group, and stack them to rebuild the original look.

Method 3: Affinity Designer, Linearity Curve, and other vector apps

You don't need Adobe to do this. Affinity Designer and Linearity Curve can both work with Procreate exports. In Curve, the usual workflow is to export a PNG from Procreate, import it, run Auto Trace, then refine the paths and export to SVG, PDF, PNG, or AI. Affinity Designer is also a common place to open and tweak SVGs that come out of Adobe Capture.

Pick based on where you want to finish the job: iPad-only, Mac, or a desktop pipeline. The tracing quality depends more on your source art than on the app.

Handling color artwork

Auto-trace is most reliable with limited palettes. For full-color paintings with gradients, soft brushes, and texture, a trace will either posterize the image or create a huge pile of tiny overlapping shapes.

Better options:

• Rebuild in layers. Separate flat color areas in Procreate, export each as its own PNG, trace them one at a time, then stack them in your vector app.
• Trace the line art only. Trace the black linework as vector and re-create the fills with simple vector shapes underneath.
• Reduce the palette first. Posterize or simplify colors before tracing, so the tracer isn't guessing at gradients.
• Accept the limits. If the piece depends on grain, wet edges, or paint texture, a vector version will not look the same. Keep it as raster.

Clean up the traced paths

Whatever tool you use, inspect the result before it goes any further.

• Zoom in and look for stray specks, tiny islands, and jagged corners.
• Delete unneeded anchor points and simplify paths where the count is excessive.
• Check for white boxes or background shapes the tracer left behind.
• Merge or group related shapes, and name layers sensibly. This pays off when you move the file into other tools.
• Confirm that closed shapes are actually closed if you plan to fill or stroke them.

A lighter, simpler path set is easier to animate and renders faster.

Bring the vector into your motion pipeline

Once you have a clean file, you can take it into your other design, motion, or 3D tools. Keep the traced shapes in logical groups, since that structure becomes your layer organization. Complex traces with thousands of points can create messy results downstream, so simplify paths before doing anything heavy with them.

Whenever possible, bring in the vector and render at final output size, rather than upscaling a PNG later.

When vectorizing isn't the right move

Sometimes the goal isn't scalability. It's animating a Procreate piece while keeping its hand-made look. Tracing can flatten that character: brush texture, pressure variation, and subtle color shifts get lost, and the result can look like a clean, generic vector.

In that case, a raster-based workflow can serve you better.

A practical split: vectorize assets you need to scale, extrude, or rig as shapes, and keep textured illustrations as raster that you animate and finish in your compositor.

Quick troubleshooting

• Trace looks blobby: Raise the threshold or use a higher-resolution export.
• Too many nodes: Adjust the trace settings, or simplify after tracing.
• White background came through: Export with a transparent background, or adjust the trace settings to drop the white.
• Thin lines disappear: Redraw them slightly thicker or lower the threshold.
• Colors merged together: Trace each color layer separately.

Summary

Procreate can't create vector files, but it works well as the drawing stage in a vector workflow. Draw with smooth brushes, export a clean transparent PNG, trace with Adobe Capture, Illustrator, Affinity, or Curve, and tidy the paths. Then take the result into your motion or 3D tools. When the texture of the original matters more than scalability, keep the art raster.