Engraving specific area of image only

i hope this question makes sense, but i am trying to engrave a wedding theme image onto a board. I want only the black area engraved, but whenever i download the image onto the glowforge and put engrave, everything shows its going to be engraved, even the areas that i dont want to be such as the spaces in the rib area, the eye and the spaces in the fingers. Is there any way to fix this?

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Itā€™s likely how the shapes in your artwork are constructed and how they are filled.

What design software are you using?

A likely simple fix would be to ā€˜rasterizeā€™ your artwork.
In Illustrator, itā€™s Object > Rasterize
In Inkscape, I think thereā€™s a Make bitmap copy function somewhere?

Basically by converting it to a bitmap vs a vector, you should get exactly what you see, where as with a vector, GF might be interpreting some things wrong.

It sounds like you might be hitting this bug:

If you wouldnā€™t mind sharing your SVG, I could verify that and help more.

Good luck!

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thanks for your response. i actually just use my silhouette program so im not familiar with illustrator or inkscape. i will have to see if there is a way for me to convert it to a bitmap or vector on my program. ill see if i can share my svg file, im sorry im not good with all this stuff

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i think this is the svg file

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I would definitely recommend learning some basics in Inkscape, the more you do with your Glowforge the more youā€™ll likely want to do various things in there.

You might start with

and/or the Inkscape column here:

I found both of these, and lots of other useful documents here:

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thank you for all this info!

Yup! you got the SVG shared hereā€¦ although I should probably ask if itā€™s ok that you shared this SVG here? You probably shouldnā€™t share someone elseā€™s work without permission. I grabbed the SVG so I can help youā€¦ if you donā€™t have permission to share it here, you might want to remove it.

Looking at the SVGā€¦ you are getting bit by the fill-mode=evenodd problem.
GFUI doesnā€™t correctly deal with one capability of SVG, that Silhouette Studio is using.

GF! FIX THIS PLEASE :smiley:

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Will this work?

scallywag

thank you for letting me know, i took it down. its the image they sent me. thank you for taking a look at it and letting me know what the problem is. i hope this is something they fix soon

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oh my gosh youre a lifesaver, it worked!!! thank you so much. can i ask what you did?

Unfortunately this has been broken for quite some time, so I wouldnā€™t hold your breath that Glowforge will fix it soon.

But more and more support tickets like this where we can point out thatā€™s the problem might help.

Itā€™s not so hard to work aroundā€¦ e.g., @beerfaced quickly fixed it for you :wink: I was about to do the sameā€¦ maybe I still will if itā€™d be useful for me to show how Iā€™d do it in Illustratorā€¦

Good luck!

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thank you so much for your help!

Beer beat me to it. But Iā€™m sure he did the same thing I did. Loaded it into illustrator or inkscape, filled in the small areas white, the large area blackā€¦ and rasterized it (or converted to bitmap depending on the program terminology).

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I had to open it in getpaint.net and save it as a pdf. Then I opened that in inkscape and did the path, trace bitmap. Then a little cleaning up and voila.
I kind of stumble my way around inkscape so there may actually be a much easier way than that lol.

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thank you fore explaining it also!!

thank you so much, you saved the day for me!!

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Glad I could help :grin:

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Hereā€™s how to fix this kind of problem in Illustrator:

You can do the same thing in Inkscapeā€¦ less sure how though :smiley:

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oh wow thank you so much, thats really helpful. ill definitely need to get more familiar with illustrator for the future!

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Hi @jboraby - Iā€™m glad to see our awesome community was able to get you sorted out here.

Thanks very much to @jestelle and @beerfaced especially for being so helpful!

@jboraby since it looks like this is taken care of Iā€™ll be going ahead and closing this topic, but please feel free to reach out via email if you have anything else you need help with.