I’ve been scouring the forums and can’t seem to find an answer to my question. I’m hoping there are some affinity designer/photo enthusiasts who know how to format a file correctly for rubber stamp making? I’m specifically talking about the ‘glow’ feature that creates the ‘ramp’ for fine lines in the design. I’ve successfully engraved tons of stamps for debossing my leatherwork but I have never used this feature and now I’m trying to create a rubber stamp finally and I think it’s really necessary. I’ve tried following the instructions that people have given for illustrator but it doesn’t seem to work once I import my image into glowforge.
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I’m not an affinity person, but I do know that you’ll need to convert your vector to raster to make a gradient work, and then use vary power in your engrave settings.
If you’re doing a vector gradient the Glowforge won’t be able to work with it. That’s not an affinity-specific issue, you’d have to do these things in any workflow.
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@Xabbess is our Affinity guru and she tries everything so I’d expect she’s done some stamp making. She should see this post since I’ve tagged her.
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Jim is correct…I try pretty much everything and yes, I have done some stamps…but, so long ago that I’m afraid I can’t remember enough to be of much help to you. And @evansd2 is also correct in that a gradient kind of image won’t really work with the Glowforge and is something you’d have to do some real testing with in Affinity. So sorry…I have only the same old advice which is to sacrifice some material to tests. I hope you find the answer!
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Here’s a discussion of how to do it in Photoshop but I’m pretty sure you can also do it in the free Gimp app. As others have said, it does need a raster program and while it’s possible that some form of Affinity can do it, I’m not a user so I can’t help.
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So most vector editors do have some way to do a gradient. The issue is that that gradient will be part of the stroke (or fill) and the Glowforge won’t recognize it.
That’s why I said you’d need to convert it to a raster image by exporting it to PNG or something like that. This is all very doable in inkscape and I could tell you how to do it there but I don’t know how to do it in affinity. I suspect that it’s a similar workflow, you’d just need to find the options in various menus.
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Here we go, after some basic googling. You need an outer glow effect.
Basically I’d make my vector shapes black, apply a 75% grey outer glow with your desired settings, then export the whole thing to a png with a white background.
Then I’d use a raster editor or the Glowforge premium tools to flip it and invert it as is necessary for making a stamp.
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Ok, this is helpful! I have no problem doing the inversion/cut out steps and then making the stamp in glowforge but it’s the whole gradient effect I haven’t messed around with yet and I’m wondering if it will be worth it. I think I’ll play around with it. I’ll see if it works and come back here to report back.
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Thank you all for chiming in! I moved all of my work over to affinity after paying for illustrator for years and I’ve found that it’s very similar for the most part although every once in a while I run into things like this that just don’t seem to translate perfectly. I’ve never used Inkscape before but maybe it’s a bettter program for this type of thing. I’ll play around and report back if I come up with a good solution in Affinity so maybe it will help someone in the future.
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Any update? Curious how your stamps worked out.
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