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.
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.
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
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
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.)
Oh yeah, the cutting problem is common…everyone expects the materials to be completely uniform, but they’re not. Things like humidity can swell them, the slightest amount of warp will affect it adversely (as little as 1 mm), so what most of us do, especially if we live in a humid area, is to use pins to flatten out the boards on the bed, and sometimes, we send a second pass, or slow down the cutting speed by about 5 to 10 points. Any of those will work to give you better results.
Cut yourself a few of these honeycomb pins…they are a lifesaver. And if the cut doesn’t make it all the way through, you can just send the cut again as long as you do not move the material on the bed or the image on the screen between cuts. (Just use a piece of tape to pull up on the cutout to see if it is clear before taking the material off of the bed.)
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.
