Images_Digital_Edition_September_2019

KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 34 images SEPTEMBER 2019 Looking at a simple object in the working file, the hat brim, you can see that despite it being a fairly complicated shape, it renders well as a curved fill using just one object and a line denoting the fill curve Examining the same simple shape as reprocessed from the stitch file shows 20 objects where there originally was one. Moreover, many of these objects no longer have addressable settings as they have been rendered as individual groups of manual stitches. Selecting the centre section reveals that the only way to edit this area of the object is to move individual stitch endpoints, even after reprocessing. Unfortunately, without the original working file, anyone who wants to make a simple change to the shape of the object, the curve of the fill, the stitch length, or the like would be better off recreating the object from scratch Opening the stitch file, the software attempts to process the stitches back into working file shapes, but as the object list on the right shows the nearly 300 drawn objects have been interpreted into 622 objects on re-import. This means that many objects are split into multiple pieces and it’s very likely that things like automated underlays and lock stitches have been processed into manual stitch objects in this version of the file This fairly simple patch design has almost 300 drawn objects, but you can see that the hat brim that’s selected in the centre of the design is only one object in the working file When working in digitising software on a working file, you edit objects by grabbing those same nodes, handles, curves and angles created in digitising the element. This means that altering a shape, like making this satin stitch wider on the right side, would only require moving eight points, and changes to things like stitch type, length or automatic underlay style, would only require a setting to be changed in the object’s properties. Stitch editing – something you might be forced to do when trying to rework a stock design from a stitch file, for example – requires the end point of each stitch to be moved manually. Moreover, changes like density alterations or underlay styles would require the addition or subtraction of stitch points, one at a time, and in sequence with the existing stitches only stitch coordinates and machine commands, losing the shapes created in the working file and the prescribed settings attached to them. Moreover, they may not even contain colour information, having only ‘colour stops’, which indicate to the machine when it’s time to switch needles. There is some software that is used to process stitch files and ‘guess’ at the vector-like objects created in their working file, but it is rarely very effective. Without ‘processing’ or software that’s able to interpolate/remove stitching directly, stitch files cannot be resized without increasing or decreasing density, altering stitch length and texture, potentially creating overly long or short stitches, and/or making details either too dense or sparse. You are able to import stitch files into digitising software to add text or combine designs into one decoration area, but any significant alteration of the basic shapes, settings or sequence requires the original working file and must be done in the same software in which the design was created. The easiest metaphor to grasp is that working files are to vector graphics what stitch files are to raster graphics exported from a vector graphic. You can create a graphic as a vector, drawing shapes and assigning colours, and then export that