Engrave problem

Yeah, okay i found the problem but it’s going to be kind of hard to explain.

Did you use an auto trace feature on this, and if so, in which program?

I don’t know what program you are using, but in Inkscape this file has open paths, double lines and areas that you want engraved are unfilled (therefore they aren’t going to engrave). I am not skilled enough at Inkscape to fix the file, but perhaps others on the forum can. In short, the file is the problem.

Hi @Jules no I use photoshop and the cut line is made with a pen tool . The image is a jpeg originally

@dklgood okay I understand maybe the unfilled part of what you are saying, but how come some of the scales like on the tale did a deep engrave, I didn’t fill any of it

If you open that up in a vector program (I used Illustrator) you can see…there are a couple of places where your parts are connected to each other…basically everything that actually engraved on the results are connected into a couple of shapes that wander all over the place.

The blue highlighted part in the image below for instance is one shape, and it will be engraved as solid when you tell it to engrave.

The reason the rest of the lines scored is that they are double score lines, not engraves. (No Fill color, they have a stroke color.)

For those you would need to delete one of the lines and then give the shapes a fill color.

I’ve never tried to do vector work in Photoshop except for creating selection areas, it’s possible that the Glowforge interface is interpreting it that way, so i don’t know what to suggest if you are using Photoshop to create the vectors.

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not sure how you got to this point, but when you zoom way in you can see this: the double-line ones are the ones that look scored, but are actually a very thin engrave.

your cut line from using the pen in photoshop looks like it worked out fine. If you were gonna stay in photoshop, I would put those cut lines around the original jpg, and engrave it as a raster.

edit-
here is the tutorial I wrote for doing that

in your case, you would use the pen tool for the outline instead of a “shape” tool.

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ugh thank you guys. I have so much to learn. I am taking an illustrator class next month. I know I am making this much harder than it needs to be. appreciate the advice. I understand most of what you all are saying. They only part I am fuzzy on is @Jules when you say that is one shape, I see that now and am not sure how that happened but do you have a suggestion for how I fix it? I am actually okay with way the thin engrave or score as you said on the scales. I don’t want any of that deep engrave

What I would do is take the original image of the fish, select and remove the background entirely by deleting it. (In Photoshop.) Then I would save that as a PNG file, which is a raster image, and will be treated as an engrave automatically.

Then you would drag and drop a copy of the PNG file onto your SVG file open in Illustrator. Delete all of the lines except the blue outside cutting lines in your SVG. Then align the PNG file in Illustrator with the cut lines that you have left over.

Embed the PNG file into the SVG file (there’s a button on the top row when the PNG file is selected) and then Save the SVG again, making sure to select Embed Images on the radio dial in the SVG dialog.

That should create the file you want I think. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks @jules I will try that later tonight

Thanks for the suggestion @Jules, that’s right.

@jcbergapparel, when you give these suggestions a try, could you please let us know how it goes?

Of course. Will be working on the art a little later when I get back home!

@jules okay so I did all this, when I go to save as the new svg where do I ‘select the embed images on the radio dial’ I don’t see this option.

Here’s what it should look like when you save the SVG:

That’s from a tutorial here that might be easier to read:

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argh I am in inkscape I don’t have illustrator yet and it does not have that options box. I did embed the png though so if I save as svg in inkscape will this still work even though it does not five me that options box? @Jules

No, Inkscape should automatically Embed it. (That tutorial tells you how to save one from Inkscape too. ) :slightly_smiling_face:

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so it definitely worked for the engrave! thank you. I kind of like the scoring on the prior version so I think I will just figure out how to solve the small areas it engraved. The cutting issue is still a problem. It won’t cut all the way through at proofgrade settings and the speed down to 150
@jules @jeremy5

P.S. I had to take a dremel to get the cut the rest of the way done and it broke the tail

One step at a time. :slightly_smiling_face:

If you want to score the lines, do an Auto-trace of the PNG file in Inkscape, and then set the various shapes to have a stroke color but no fill color. (You will first want to make sure to correct the connected sections in Photoshop by painting over the connected areas with white, so that the black is not connected.)

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thank you!!! will post that next