X3F to SVG Converter

How to Convert X3F to SVG Online

1. Upload Your X3F File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to select X3F RAW files from your Sigma camera card (SD9 / SD10 / SD14 / SD15 / SD1 Merrill, DP Merrill / DP Quattro, or SD Quattro / SD Quattro H). Batch is supported — drop in a whole shoot's worth of files at once and they're queued in parallel.
2. Set Number Precision (Optional): Open Advanced Options. The only exposed setting is the Number precision slider (1-10, default 6). One value drives two things inside the tracer: how finely colours are separated when pixels are clustered into regions, and how many decimal places each path coordinate keeps.
3. Pick a Recommended Precision Range: 4-6 is recommended for most use cases. Drop it to 1-3 for the smallest output XML and the most simplified shapes. Do not use 9 or 10 — those two positions abort the job and produce no file, because the same value is sent as the colour precision and colour precision is only defined for 1 to 8 bits per RGB channel. Treat 8 as the real top of the slider.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert". Each output is an XML SVG document made of real <path> elements traced from the image — no sign-up, no watermark, no email gating. Download individually or as a ZIP.

What This Conversion Actually Does (Read This First)

X3F is a raster RAW format — every pixel is sensor data captured by Sigma's three-layer Foveon X3 sensor, with no shape, path, or vector geometry anywhere in the file. SVG is a vector format that describes shapes mathematically. This converter bridges the two by tracing, not by wrapping: the image is handed to a raster-to-vector tracer, which clusters pixels into colour regions, fits curves to the boundaries of those regions, and writes actual <path> elements into the SVG. Nothing is base64-encoded and nothing is placed inside an <image> element — the output is genuine vector geometry you can select, recolour, and edit node by node.

That is the good news and the catch at the same time. A trace approximates the source with paths. On flat artwork — a two-colour logo, a line drawing, a silhouette, a high-contrast graphic — the approximation is close enough to be indistinguishable, and the result is a small file that scales forever. On a photograph it is not: a 14-megapixel Foveon landscape has millions of subtly varying pixels and no clean shape boundaries, so the tracer either collapses it into a few hundred lumpy colour blobs (unrecognisable) or emits hundreds of thousands of micro-paths (an enormous SVG that is slow to open and looks worse than the JPEG you started from). Decide which of those two your picture is before you convert.

X3F is also not one of the tracer's native input formats — those are PNG, JPG/JPEG, JFIF, BMP, GIF and WebP — so a RAW file has to be rendered to a standard raster before any tracing can happen. Doing that step yourself is worth considering as a quality decision rather than a chore: developing the RAW gives you control over exposure, white balance, crop and output size, and those choices dominate how good a trace looks far more than any slider on this page. Convert the X3F to PNG or JPG first, look at the result, then trace it with PNG to SVG or JPG to SVG. Common reasons people want X3F → SVG at all:

• A graphic mark shot or scanned on a Sigma body — Repro photography of a logo, sign, stencil or engraving is exactly the high-contrast subject tracing was built for, and the result drops into vector workflows as editable paths.
• Drop into Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD — Design tools accept .svg as a first-class asset, and traced paths arrive as real objects you can restyle rather than a flat picture.
• Web embedding with a single asset type — Some build pipelines (Astro, Eleventy themes, MDX content) only inline SVGs by convention, and a traced mark inlines to a few kilobytes.
• Cut, engrave, or plot the shape — Cutters and laser engravers need path geometry, not pixels. A trace produces the closed outlines those machines follow.
• Archive a graphic in a long-lived open format — SVG 1.1 is a W3C Recommendation (Second Edition, 16 August 2011). Sigma stopped shipping new Foveon cameras after the SD Quattro line (2016), so moving usable artwork out of a proprietary RAW container keeps it accessible if the decoders fall away.

If your subject is a portrait, a landscape, or a product shot with soft gradients, no tracer setting will rescue it. Keep the photo as a raster: X3F to PNG, X3F to JPG, or X3F to TIFF for a 16-bit master.

X3F vs SVG — Format Comparison

Number Precision Setting — What It Controls

Because one slider feeds both parameters, lowering it merges similar colours and simplifies curves in the same move — which is why its effect on a traced file is so visible, and why 8 is a hard ceiling rather than a soft recommendation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this produce real vector paths, or an embedded bitmap?

Real paths. The tracer clusters the image by colour, fits curves to the region boundaries, and writes <path> elements — it does not base64-encode your picture inside an <image> tag. That is why a traced logo stays crisp at any zoom and can be edited node by node. The trade-off is approximation: the output is the tracer's best geometric reading of your pixels, excellent for flat graphics and poor for photographs.

Why is the resulting SVG file so large — bigger than the JPEG?

Because you traced a continuous-tone image. Every gradient step becomes its own filled path, and a photograph has an enormous number of them; the XML that describes them all can easily outweigh the compressed raster it came from. Drop Number precision toward 3-4 and re-run, or accept that this subject wants a raster format — X3F to PNG or X3F to JPG.

Will my SVG be infinitely scalable like a real vector logo?

Yes — the geometry is genuinely vector, so it scales without blurring. The honest caveat is fidelity, not scalability: what scales is the tracer's approximation of your image, not the image itself. Enlarge a traced logo and it stays sharp; enlarge a traced photograph and you see clean, sharp, wrong shapes. Scalability is only worth having when the traced shapes were right to begin with.

Does the conversion preserve Foveon's three-layer colour data?

No. The Foveon X3 sensor records red, green, and blue at every pixel via three stacked photodiodes, but that wide-gamut data is collapsed to standard sRGB during rendering, and the tracer then reduces it further to a limited set of flat region fills. If you need the full Foveon colour science, keep the X3F and edit it in Sigma Photo Pro, or export to a 16-bit format like TIFF instead.

Will the SVG open on my Sigma camera, in Photoshop, or in Lightroom?

The SVG opens in every modern browser, Inkscape, Illustrator, Figma, Sketch, and most operating-system image previews. Photoshop opens SVGs through Place / Open and rasterises them into a layer. Lightroom does not import SVG — it's a vector tool's domain. The camera itself can't display SVG either; it only previews its own X3F and JPEG output.

Can I edit the photo content after converting to SVG?

You can edit the shapes, which is a different thing. Every traced region is a selectable path: recolour it, delete it, reshape its nodes, merge it with a neighbour. What you cannot do is a tonal RAW edit — exposure recovery, white balance, highlight rescue — because there is no longer any photographic data to work with, only geometry. Do that work first, in Sigma Photo Pro or RawTherapee, and trace the developed result.

What's the difference between this and using Sigma Photo Pro's export?

Sigma Photo Pro doesn't export SVG at all — it exports JPEG, TIFF, and X3I (its multi-shot format). Landing at SVG always means tracing a rendered raster; the only question is who renders it. This page does both steps for you. Doing the render yourself first is the higher-quality route when the subject is marginal, because exposure, crop and output size drive trace quality more than any setting here does.

Will text or metadata from my camera become real SVG text?

No. Sigma X3F files store XMP and proprietary metadata (camera model, ISO, lens info, shooting date), but none of it becomes editable SVG <text> elements. Lettering that appears in the picture is traced as outline shapes like everything else — it will look right and scale fine, but it is not selectable, searchable, or re-typeable text. If you need a real caption or watermark as vector text, add it after conversion in Inkscape or Figma.

Are my X3F files safe — does anything get uploaded permanently?

No. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No account is required and there are no watermarks, file-count limits, or hidden Pro tiers. Nothing is shared or made public, and nothing about a 20-50 MB Merrill or Quattro frame is kept once that window has passed.

What if the trace comes back empty or the job stops with nothing to download?

Check the Number precision slider first: positions 9 and 10 stop the run outright with an out-of-range error, so drop it to 8 or below and re-run. If the slider was already low, the likely cause is a flat, low-contrast render with no colour boundaries for the tracer to find. Develop the RAW yourself — X3F to PNG — push the contrast until the shape you care about separates cleanly from its background, then trace that PNG with PNG to SVG.