Image Trace is not one algorithm.
The preset changes what it is doing entirely — and the default is tuned for the wrong input.
The default preset posterises, and Expand freezes whatever it produced
Image Trace ships defaulting to a general-purpose colour mode that quantises the image into many colour bands — reasonable for a photograph, wrong for a logo, and the cause of most "Illustrator traced it badly" results. The other half of the problem is workflow: the trace stays live and adjustable until you hit Expand, at which point it becomes paths and every setting is baked in. People expand early, discover the result is wrong, and then try to fix thousands of committed shapes by hand. Threshold on a two-colour trace does more for output quality than any other control, and almost nobody moves it.
How to confirm it
- Which preset is active
- Default/High Fidelity Colour posterises. Flat art wants Black and White or Low Colour.
- Threshold value
- On Black and White this is the single most important control. The default rarely suits.
- Did you Expand already
- After Expand the settings are gone. Undo back to the live trace rather than editing paths.
- Paths panel count
- Thousands of objects from a simple logo means colour mode on anti-aliased input.
- Noise setting
- Low values keep every speck of compression artefact as its own shape.
The fix
Everything is adjustable before Expand and nothing is adjustable after. Do not edit expanded paths.
Flat art and logos: Black and White or a low colour count, then move the threshold until edges land right.
If the source is a compressed screenshot, no preset saves it — fix the source, or trace it here and check the path count.
Fix it here.
Upload the original image. The preview shows the real path count before you pay.
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FAQ
Start with Black and White if the mark is one colour, or a Low Colour preset with the count set to the number of colours actually in the design. Then adjust threshold. The colour presets are built for photographic input and will treat every anti-aliased edge as another colour worth its own shapes.
Expand converts the live preview into real paths and discards the trace parameters. Before it, changing a slider re-runs the whole trace; after it, you have thousands of committed objects and the only honest fix is undo. Expand last, once the preview is right.
It is a capable tool operated badly by default. Tuned properly on clean flat art it produces good results. The practical differences are that it needs per-image tuning, and that it gives you no path count until after you commit — so you discover an unusable file at the point it is hardest to undo.
Only cosmetically. Simplify reduces anchor points within existing shapes; it cannot merge posterised fragments back into regions. If the structure is wrong, re-tracing from the raster is faster than any amount of cleanup.