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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It’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 ‘rasterize’ your artwork.
In Illustrator, it’s Object > Rasterize
In Inkscape, I think there’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 wouldn’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 you’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 here… although I should probably ask if it’s ok that you shared this SVG here? You probably shouldn’t share someone else’s work without permission. I grabbed the SVG so I can help you… if you don’t have permission to share it here, you might want to remove it.

Looking at the SVG… you are getting bit by the fill-mode=evenodd problem.
GFUI doesn’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 wouldn’t hold your breath that Glowforge will fix it soon.

But more and more support tickets like this where we can point out that’s the problem might help.

It’s not so hard to work around… e.g., @beerfaced quickly fixed it for you :wink: I was about to do the same… maybe I still will if it’d be useful for me to show how I’d do it in Illustrator…

Good luck!

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thank you so much for your help!

Beer beat me to it. But I’m sure he did the same thing I did. Loaded it into illustrator or inkscape, filled in the small areas white, the large area black… 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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Here’s how to fix this kind of problem in Illustrator:

You can do the same thing in Inkscape… 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 - I’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 I’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.