I dont know what I am doing wrong, but when I take a transparent png and open it in coreldraw and then put a cut square around it, once i save it, it is no longer transparent but has a white background.
I didn’t think this would be a problem because I thought the GF would ignore anything that is white. But it is not. Even in the preview window it is showing little tiny dots all over the background.
What am I doing wrong?
Either it’s not pure white, or you’re saving as a jpg and getting compression artifacts.
Either way, though, white is still a color – it’s not going to be ignored. 
I understand about artifacts…but, I remember (I think correctly) Dan saying that the GF cannot/does not see white. @whickmant said they saved it as a png. I agree though that usually when there are a bunch of dots that are getting engraved, that there are definitely artifacts still in there.
They said they opened it as a png.
In my experience, just saving as a png on a transparent background does not necessarily remove the background that’s already present behind the image. I think you’d need to completely remove the background, then re-save as a png again.
You’re right…just reread that.
Glowforge does see vector white. It does not see rasterized “pure white”.
Problem with that is, there can be individual pixels of “near-white” color that are not removed when you remove the background in a PNG, so those are not removed, and they will get carried over into the work in Corel.
The little specs you are seeing there are probably a few pixels of “almost white” color from the original PNG, that hadn’t been removed.
The way to find them is, open the PNG in a program like Photoshop. Select the image and temporarily assign a stroke color to it from the Layer Style menu.
You will see every stray pixel highlighted in sharp relief. Then hit it with the Eraser.
Easiest thing is to upload the image here so we can look at it instead of guessing.
Yea I am unsure, but unless I am doing something wrong, it seems importing a transparent PNG into coreldraw and saving as svg shows the transparent as white. Couldnt get it any other way. What I did was convert the image to curves, then saw weird shapes I didnt recognize and just delete them. they seemed to be the 'white background." then GF etched the correct parts!
I wonder if coreldraw is putting a white background in place of the transparency?
I’m glad to hear that you were able to resolve the issue! A big thanks to the folks in the forum who were a big help in figuring out the issue, but I’ll be closing this thread now. If you run into any other trouble or have any other questions, feel free to open up a new thread or contact us directly at support@glowforge.com.
