VectorFox 3.0: real gradients, a live preview, and presets built for AI art

VectorFox 3.0 is a new tracing engine wearing the same app. The tracer is now vtracer 1.0 with VectorFox's own gradient fitting on top, compiled into the app rather than run as a separate program, and nearly everything else in this release follows from that: a preview that moves while you drag a slider, output an editor can actually work with, and presets for the images people really drop on it in 2026, which are mostly made by an image generator.

Gradients: the thing no other tracer does

Every tracer fills a region with one flat color. Give one a glossy button or a shaded logo and you get stripes, or a single averaged color, and no setting fixes it. VectorFox recognises where a region's color genuinely ramps and fills it with a real SVG <linearGradient> or <radialGradient> fitted to the original pixels, highlight and falloff included. Where tracing has to cut a smooth ramp into bands, those bands share one gradient, so the seams disappear instead of showing as steps. Take the Firefox logo: a 406 KB PNG comes out as a 53 KB SVG of 34 paths, and the globe's radial, the fox's belly and the flame of the tail are all gradients you can select and re-tint, not stacks of orange slivers. 3.0 fits those gradients more closely and more cheaply than 2.0 did, and identical ones share a single definition.

Made for AI art

Image generators produce bitmaps of things that were meant to be vectors: flat illustrations, logos, stickers, icons. The new AI Art preset is built around exactly that: clean edges, one piece per color, up to 32 colors, gradients kept where the image really has them. An illustration that traced to 719 paths in 537 slightly different colors now comes out as 37 paths in 37 colors, and opens in Illustrator or Affinity as something you can select and recolor. Balanced now cuts along edges rather than by color, so a soft shadow in the same hue as what it falls on, or the layers of a tail drawn in one color, stay their own pieces. Clean Bands turns shadows and glows into a few smooth bands for the poster look, and Logo replaces Simplistic with a 12-color cutout that emits true circles and rectangles.

VectorFox also says so, up front, when an image is a poor candidate. Each file gets a Good, Fair or Poor fit label with a plain reason, and a batch with Poor images gets one warning with Convert Anyway or Skip These. Photographs were never something a tracer could do well; the app now tells you rather than letting the result do it.

A preview that keeps up

Every trace used to write a PNG to disk, launch a helper and read the result back. With the engine in-process and keeping its work between runs, changing a curve or color setting re-traces in about a tenth of a second, so the inspector is live: drag a slider and the picture follows, reduced while you drag and full resolution the moment you let go. There is no Apply button any more, and the previous picture stays until the new one has drawn. Save always writes the full-resolution result, and the settings a result was traced with travel with it for as long as the app is open.

Also new

Remove background clears the color touching the image edges before tracing, with a tolerance for backdrops that are not quite one color, and clears the enclosed gaps too; Subject only lifts the main subject off a busy background with the same detection Photos uses. Black & White clustering gained Trace light areas for a white logo on black, a Threshold slider, and an adaptive mode for unevenly lit scans. Export profiles give makers what they need in one step: Outline for laser and vinyl cutters, Cut File for Cricut and Silhouette, and Layered for editing, with Export All applying one to a whole batch. And every saved SVG groups its pieces by color, drops what is hidden, and simplifies each curve to the fewest points that stay within a pixel of the original.

VectorFox 3.0 is a free update for every license, and the 14-day trial has all of it. It is $9.99 paid once, and runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later on Apple silicon and Intel. Get it from the VectorFox page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/vectorfox. Everything, down to the fixes, is in the changelog.