Line weight?

[jessica.kellogg11]

If I’m creating a pattern in photoshop, how does the weight of the line come into play?
If I have a thick line, does the laser do the full thickness or does it do the two outside edges? Is it different for cutting vs engraving?

Thanks!

[Jules]

Photoshop is a raster drawing program and only creates objects that can be engraved. So in Photoshop, the thickness of the line is how thick it will be engraved.

In Illustrator though, setting a different stroke thickness has no impact on how wide the cut line will be…the cut line follows the path down the center of the stroke. (Unless the stroke is Expanded into the equivalent filled shapes.)

More explanation here:

Laser Design Basics

Laser Design Basics.pdf (770.3 KB) dl488 9/6/17

[jessica.kellogg11]

Thanks for the info.
Do you know if I can using the Pen tool in photoshop to create the vectors or do I actually need to use Illustrator?

[Jules]

I’ve used the pen tool in Photoshop to create selection areas, and while it’s a vector tool, I haven’t ever tried to convert that information into something that the GFUI can read.

It might be possible to do, but it’s probably going to be a whole lot easier to work with software that is designed primarily to create vectors. (You can export your paths to Illustrator.)

If you want to take a shot at it direct from PS, you might be limited to saving it in PDF format. Let us know if it works.

[jbmanning5]

@jessica.kellogg11

Thanks for the info.
Do you know if I can using the Pen tool in photoshop to create the vectors or do I actually need to use Illustrator?

You can. It’s, to me, no where as easy as Illustrator, but yes, Photoshop has both vector and raster tools.

[jbv]

Vector Cut Files from Photoshop: etch AND cut without illustrator

Illustrator is powerful. If you are using the Adobe suite, you would do well to learn how to use Illustrator to work with vectors. But going from your comfort zone in Photoshop into Illustrator can be daunting. Good news: For certain simple shapes, you don’t have to. In the case of making a simple cutline around an image, you can create Shapes (rectangle, circle, polygon, line, custom; shortcut key for the currently selected shape tool is “u”), and those can be exported as SVG. This tutoria…

[jessica.kellogg11]

I’ve played with Illustrator a bit, but don’t have it one my computer right now.

[deirdrebeth]

If you don’t already have Illustrator, then Inkscape does the same things and is free…

[GrooveStranger]

Affinity Designer is Illustrator-like for $50, and has many fans here.

I would pay $50 to be able to forget the one time I used Inkscape. I do not care for it at all.

[averly]

Thanks for all of the suggestions, everyone!