Turn a PNG into an EPS your print shop will accept
A print shop, a screen printer or an embroidery digitiser rarely asks for "a vector file". They ask for an EPS, by name, in a one-line email. What you have is a PNG: exported from a web tool, or handed over by whoever drew the logo three jobs ago. Renaming it to .eps changes nothing — the pixels stay pixels, and the shop's RIP still has no outlines to work with.
This page traces that PNG into PostScript geometry: flat colour regions become closed paths, written as cubic curve segments and either filled with the eofill operator or stroked, depending on the draw style. The header is the EPSF-3.0 line that older RIPs and upload forms look for, and what follows is path geometry, not a bitmap in a wrapper.
One thing you can settle before you send it: the size. Type a finished width and height into the millimetre fields and the BoundingBox is written to that measurement in points, rounded up to the whole point — ask for 200 mm and the box is 567 pt. Leave the fields empty and the box follows the trace instead, so the 512 by 512 mark below comes back as a 512 by 512 pt box, roughly 180.6 mm square. Both scale without loss, but a shop that quoted a measurement would rather not have to apply it by hand.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Upload your PNG (PNG, JPEG or WEBP, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels, one image per conversion).
- Tick EPS in the format list, and type the finished width and height into the millimetre fields if the shop quoted a measurement.
- Set the colour count to match the job: 2 for a single screen, 4 to 8 for spot-colour work.
- Convert, then read the preview closely: the holes in letters, the corners of the mark, the thin strokes.
- Sign in with Google (free) to download the .eps file.
Who this is for
EPS survives because a lot of production kit was bought before the browser mattered and still earns its keep. Screen printers put each colour on its own screen and pull film positives from a RIP that has read EPS for decades. Embroidery digitisers want clean closed outlines to lay stitches over. Sign makers and promotional-product suppliers hand you an order form where .eps sits at the top of the file-type list and .svg is not on it at all.
So the job here is narrow: hand those people a file that behaves the way they expect, and be straight about what it is not.
It is not colour-managed. Shapes carry RGB values, so a shop printing process or spot inks maps them in their own software. Flat traced regions keep that mapping quick, but no ink names or overprint instructions travel inside the file.
It is not an embroidery or cutting file either. What we write is SVG, PDF, EPS, DXF and PNG; stitches belong to the digitiser, and a clean EPS is the input that makes their hour cheap rather than expensive. If the shop drives a cutter rather than a press, ask for DXF R2010 (AC1024) instead — polylines and splines at millimetre scale.
Settings we suggest
Tick EPS in the format list, and add SVG, PDF or DXF in the same run if other departments want their own copy — the millimetre size reaches all four, so the set agrees on dimensions; choosing more than one format also produces a ZIP.
Colours decides how the job prints; the range is 2 to 64. Choose 2 for a one-screen print or a stencil and you get a single flat shape with nothing behind it. Four to eight is the useful band for spot-colour work and for artwork going to a digitiser: one shape per ink, clean boundaries, none of the dithered speckle a PNG picks up from a web export. Go higher only when the artwork really carries blends.
Draw style picks the PostScript operator: leave it on fill_shapes and every region is filled with eofill, while stroke_shapes and stroke_edges write the same contours as strokes instead, which suits anyone following an edge rather than filling it.
Shape stacking should stay on cut-outs, so a hole in a ring stays a hole instead of a lighter shape sitting on a darker one and inks do not pile up where they were never meant to. Group by only rearranges the g elements inside an SVG, so it makes no difference to your EPS.
Two notes on size. The millimetre fields reach this writer, so what you type becomes the BoundingBox once it is converted into points and rounded up: 150 mm is a 426 pt box. And images above 1.5 megapixels are downscaled before tracing, so with the fields left empty a 4000 by 3000 original comes back at roughly 1414 by 1061 units and the BoundingBox follows that smaller figure.
Questions
The shop asked for a proper vector EPS. Is this one?
Yes. It opens with the EPSF-3.0 header, and everything after that is PostScript path geometry — moveto, lineto and curveto segments closed into subpaths, then filled with eofill or stroked. No bitmap is pasted inside. In Illustrator or CorelDRAW you can select single shapes and drag their points.
Can I get the EPS at an exact physical measurement, say 180 mm wide?
Yes. Put 180 in the width field, with a matching height, and the BoundingBox comes back as 511 points — 180 mm, rounded up to the whole point. With the fields left empty the box is taken from the trace instead, so a 512 pixel wide trace gives a 512 pt box, near 180.6 mm. Either way the paths are real curves, so the shop can still scale the file and soften nothing.
Will the colours arrive as CMYK or as named spot inks?
No. Shapes carry RGB values, and your printer maps each flat colour to process or spot ink in their own workflow. Keep the colour count low so there is little to map: two to eight flat colours is a short conversation, thirty is not.
My PNG has a transparent background. What happens to it?
It stays empty. Pixels with an alpha above 10 count as artwork and anything below that is treated as outside the canvas, so no white rectangle appears behind your mark. Semi-transparent pixels are composited over white first, so a soft drop shadow returns as pale grey shapes rather than as transparency.
Can you produce the embroidery stitch file too?
No. The outputs are SVG, PDF, EPS, DXF and PNG. Stitches are digitised in dedicated software, and what a digitiser wants from you is closed outlines and a handful of flat colours — which is what the EPS holds.
How long does a conversion take, and what are the limits?
Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line or noisy artwork takes longer, and a conversion that has not finished within 60 seconds stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image. Uploads go up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels, one image at a time. Before you sign in you get 10 conversions per hour; signing in raises that to 60 per hour and 300 per day. Download links expire after 1 hour, and files are cleared by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.