Premium Software - Add a Cut Line around your Image 🤔

[Jules]

Say you want to add a Cut Line around a cool jpeg or png image that you found…it’s very simple in Premium.

1. Create a new File by clicking on Create > New file in the Dashboard.

2. Drag and drop your image file onto the bed…it will load the file and show the operations for it in the left column.

OMG! No cutting line! All you see listed is an Engrave in the lefthand column!

No worries! Select the drawing, then click the Create Outline button shown.

3. Once you have created the outline (which will be a cut line) you can adjust the size to give it a wider margin around the drawing or make it fit in tight.

That’s it! Very easy to use.

You can use the Create Outline feature in the Premium service to create a Cut line around any kind of raster or vector image, or both together, which is unusual in drawing software. Most have to treat the two types of files differently, and require additional steps.

[sqw]

OOOoooh, now you know all those mandala effects?

I wonder if you could use this same trick to create mandala layers?

Incidentally, recently had to do this in Inkscape and there’s not way to do it - because inkscape sees the graphic as rectangle, not a sea-horse. Have to hand draw it instead.

[cynd11]

Thanks for doing this @jules, I think a lot of folks don’t understand how useful the outline function is.

[rbtdanforth]

@sqw

Incidentally, recently had to do this in Inkscape and there’s not way to do it - because inkscape sees the graphic as rectangle, not a sea-horse. Have to hand draw it instead.

I use Gimp almost exclusively for that now. You can easily create or manipulate a mask as is normal and then save it as a path and export the path as an SVG.

I have it in tips in detail:

Doing the offset thing in Gimp

That offset in the new Glowforge GFUI works really well. So well it has made me hate trying to accomplish it in Inkscape. error-> So I have been using Gimp and resizing the image by enlarging the mask and scaling to the mask. You can use the mask to create a path and you can use the path to add or subtract from the mask and all sorts of special effects from a line along the path to text along that path. So I take the image and create a mask to the size of the image and then under Selection, …

[evansd2]

@sqw

there’s not way to do it

Generally trace bitmap and path booleans/offset. Should take almost no time. The ui automates this bit but has its own costs.

Some reason this wouldn’t work? If it doesn’t it means your image isn’t a good candidate for this and neither will the UI because they do the exact same thing in principle.

[sqw]

You are correct on both counts, but it does depend on your input image.

The problem with trace bitmap is (a) it sometimes crashes, (b) creates a lot of segments which don’t always boolean together well.

Agreed though, hasty to see you can’t do it.

[evansd2]

Never seen a) … windows or Mac? I’m on Windows and trace has never crashed. Now the post trace Boolean maybe… but never the trace.

As for b), if your source image isn’t clean and/or your sensitivity slider isn’t properly adjusted you can definitely get rogue bits of path. In cases where the image isn’t clean, I typically preprocess in gimp and then import it for trace.

[rmaker1952]

Very interesting, I will give it a try. Game changer. Thank You for the info Jules. You made my day.

[djfb]

Nice tutorial! Thanks.

[collageandwood]

this isn’w working for me - the outline is there but it won’t cut. Any tips to troubleshoot?

[Jules]

Just to make sure the entire image and outline is on the cutting area…there are non-cuttable margins at the sides, you might have to shift it slightly on screen so that it all falls on the cutting bed.

[rbtdanforth]

@collageandwood

Any tips to troubleshoot?

Any part of the design not in the cutting area will cause the glowforge to not cut any of the design. It will not affect how the outline works. I have found it best to unify the outline with the shape by selecting all and left clicking and pick group. that way you will move the whole group at once instead of just the outline.

[nikonpro1]

I have done this with several drawings I have. The problem I have run into is some of my drawings have cutouts within the drawing and these show up as graphics instead of cuts. Any ideas how to turn these into cuts?
Thank you,

[Xabbess]

I’ve worked with several things like you describe. I usually resort to tracing in my design app…creating a vector line where I want the cut-out to be…overlaying the drawing.