Pre Release | Falling In Love With Trace Function

I haven’t worked much at all with the trace function on this machine because I’ve had so many of my own designs I wanted to try. But @bill_laba’s recent trace results really inspired me to give it a go.

It’s no secret to many of you that I like to do rubberstamping and make cards (in fact, @marmak3261 has commented on the size of my stamp collection). Often I will stamp an image then hand cut it with scissors so I can use the added dimension on a card. No hand cutting needed any more, I’ve got a laser!


For scale, the rubber boots image is less than 1.5" tall.

These images were stamped on 140 lb cold press watercolor paper then placed in the bed of the Glowforge. I used the Trace function of the GFUI to autotrace the images (truly astounding trace quality!) then cut them on the perimeters. Stamp set used was from PinkInk stamps. Power 1%, speed 197 in/min.

54 Likes

Wow…perfect little miniatures! Adorable.

3 Likes

My neighbor does scrap booking and she is going to absolutely love this feature.

2 Likes

Wow! Those turned out a lot better than I would have expected! :sunglasses:

(Have you recently tried forgoing the Print and Cut process and just using the Glowforge Trace function on the kitties? It looks like they’ve got the alignment just about squared away.)

2 Likes

I just manually positioned in the GFUI. But I can’t leave the trace outline where it shows up as a default (right over the image). I’ve learned that the particular offset that my machine has is four clicks with the arrow key to the left and four up when zoomed in to 450%. This was simple to determine by placing a piece of graph paper on the bed, cutting a crosshair (created in Illustrator), and determining how many clicks it takes to get the the image to cut exactly where I want it. It is very reproducible so I only had to do it once. Now I just zoom in to 450%, place the image exactly where I want it to be, then do the four clicks thing.

This offset amount may vary with machine, and may disappear altogether when the final alignment tweaking is complete. But in the meantime it’s no trouble to account for and get perfect results.

11 Likes

This seems to show that the image to final cut has become VERY accurate.

1 Like

very nice demo. Glad this worked out for you. Such playful, delightful images.

It is worth dialing in then my own machine and see how the offset works out. I know you have talked about this before, but I couldn’t quite get it, thinking that on the left side of the machine it would be off one way and right side off another. Same with top and bottom. Will try some targets like this sometime.

1 Like

Those are adorable!!

Wow. You’ve got it down to a science. A Laser Science. I’ve just been I’ve just been pushing, dragging, and arrow clicking around to position things. I’ll have to try your method for adjustments.

2 Likes

I have a Brother Scan-n-Cut and I don’t think that it can do this anywhere close to what you have shown here. Plus, I get the feeling that weeding intricate cuts will all af a sudden not be such a chore. Thanks for posting this!

2 Likes

I have a Brother Scan n Cut as well. Haven’t used it in months. There are a couple things the Scan n Cut does pretty well that the Glowforge currently doesn’t do, but that is just software and I’m confident that Glowforge’s will get there eventually. One is the selection of traced items (currently you can only draw a rectangle around the item so it’s hard to avoid nearby images), and the other is the ability to include a user-selectable outline of extra space around each traced item.

3 Likes