![]() Set a Stroke Color to whatever you choose, and turn the Original Image back on by toggling the eye. When you’re done Unlock the Compound Path.Ĭlick the Compound Path on the artboard to select it. It’s quicker than getting rid of them one at a time. ![]() If you toggle one and the image on the board doesn’t change, you don’t need it and can delete it.įirst lock the Compound Path that has the paths that you want to keep (usually the top one) by toggling the LOCK, (not the eye), then select everything on the board and hit the Delete key. Generally you can just delete those all white thumbnail paths by dragging them down to the trashcan in the lower right corner of the palette because they are duplicates, but if you want to check them first, just toggle the visibility with the little eye icon next to each path. You will typically see one or more Compound paths that have black thumbnail images at the top, followed by a bunch of individual Path thumbnails that look all white. Click on the trace results on the board to select it.The more interior holes your original image had, the worse this is going to be, so you really need to develop a system for dealing with it. That needs to be broken up and the individual path(s) that we need to use picked out. Notice that the upper image has been replaced with Grouped trace results in the Layer palette. (Illustrator duplicates a lot of paths during its Live Trace. When you like the results, click on the Expand button in the top row, to create the vector paths. The idea is to get a neat silhouette of the image. (Although it’s called Live Trace, you do need to occasionally click on the image itself to see the changes.) Drag the slider lower to get rid of black junk outside of the outline. Drag the value higher to get rid of white areas inside the silhouette. You want to start with a Threshold of about 220-230 for a multicolored image. File > New > OKĬlick and drag the jpeg file from your desktop, and drop it onto the artboard. Scan your image and save it as a jpg file to your desktop. ![]() Try to scan in the 100-300 dpi range for a better trace. Stuff you screen cap from the internet is 72 dpi, low resolution, and you generally don’t get a very good trace from it. The higher the dpi (dots per inch) that you scan with, the better detail you are going to get in your scan, but the larger file size might crash the drawing program. (There’s a reason why they use markers for the Glowforge demos.) You want to create a clean crisp delineation between the black and the white for the auto-trace function to pick up. Smudged lines are going to give a very messy outline when the item is traced. Light colors are not going to scan well most auto-trace programs cannot differentiate well between pale yellow or pink and white. Black ink on white paper will give you a better result than pencil on parchment. While you are preparing your drawing, try to create as much contrast between the paper and the lines as possible. (These apply to all of the drawing software, so you’ll see them at the front of each tutorial.) If you need more explanation why I’m doing something, just ask in the comments, I want to keep this writeup as lean as possible. ![]() In addition, since Illustrator has its own way of doing things, some of the things I do might not make sense when I show them here, but they are necessary to get around the way Illustrator does things internally. You frequently have to find what you are looking for hidden inside multiple palettes, so it takes longer to get familiar with where everything is. Seriously, the program offers so many options that it is bloated. Illustrator is a little bit more difficult to use to create an Offset Path, not because the process is any different, but because I suspect that everyone at Adobe thinks that we all enjoy a good Easter Egg hunt to liven things up when we’re working. This technique is used to create a “white space” around the image that one is engraving, before cutting out. Continuing the discussion from Glowforge's Trace Functionality: ![]()
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