Images_Digital_Edition_September_2019

KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 36 images SEPTEMBER 2019 Erich Campbell is an award-winning digitiser, embroidery columnist and educator, with more than 20 years’ experience both in production and the management of e-commerce properties. He is the programme manager for the commercial division of BriTon Leap. www.erichcampbell.com graphic to a JPG or PNG file. Though you could add elements over that image or potentially process it, if you want to change the shapes you created in your original art, you’ll need the original vector file. Similarly, auto-tracing, which creates a new vector file from a source raster image, renders files that are noticeably less ‘clean’ than the original source. Which file type(s) do you need? Ultimately, many embroiderers never digitise nor edit embroidery files. If you prefer to leave that to punchers like myself, the stitch file (coupled with a colour sequence document) will suffice. If you intend to rework designs, compensate for wildly different substrates, or even edit text in-house with ease and efficiency, the working file is desirable if not essential. If you never intend to go further than adding surrounding text or changing the orientation of a design, simple compositing software with functions for type and basic stitch files is likely to be all you’ll need for most applications. The working file has 132 objects, and the fourth colour is a single small crescent of shading fill, here rendered from a single object In this reprocessed file created from a stitch file, the number of objects has ballooned from 132 to 316. Also, on the simple crescent shape that was selected in the working file example, the object has been split into three pieces, with the bottom third of the crescent rendered as manual stitches, making it possible to change settings only on a portion of the object. This file type maintains thread colours, but for editing/ alteration, you’ll find many of the objects altered enough that they are unable to be changed/altered without extensive redrawing and/or clean-up When looking at the stitch file, you might at first not see any difference, but a quick glance at the object panel shows that only the colour stops are available to select separately. Any alterations to this piece would have to be done one stitch at a time, or at least by moving selected stitch endpoints. In the lower right properties pane, none of the original settings are present, nor can the parameters of the design be altered Classic stitch file formats, such as the ubiquitous DST format, may not store colour information, meaning that opening these formats in any software will display them in the default palette native to the software In my working file for this emoji design, you can see the backdrop that belongs to the original artwork I used to create the design. Notice, too, that the individual objects drawn for the design, with their properties, are available in the objects tree on the upper right hand side. On the lower right, the settings for this particular object can be seen and altered. In the design page, you’ll see that with the fill object that defines the crown of the hat selected, the vector outline is shown with the handles ready for editing the curves. Moreover, the curve that is used to define the curve in the fill stitch is there for alteration. In the working file you can alter and scale the design, and the software will process the resulting changes into stitches that match the parameters set in the object properties Here you can see the finished Super Strypi logo sample, rendered on a cotton piqué polo swatch [All images courtesy of the author]