Stitch Era - digitizing complex vector images

Draft

This article or section is currently under construction

In principle, someone is working on it and there should be a better version in a not so distant future.
If you want to modify this page, please discuss it with the person working on it (see the "history")

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Introduction

This is a beginner's tutorial for the Stitch Era embroidery software. It explains how to go from imported more difficult bitmaps and vector images to embroidery. If you are new to Stitch Era, read Stitch Era - simple digitizing first.

Introductory example

We shall try to improve our digitzed LAMS logo a bit.

Bringing out bitmap colors

Preliminary steps

• Load the bitmap
• Keep its size, since making it bigger won't help the process in our opinion

Before we vectorize the initial picture we transformed its colors:

• Max saturation: to bring out colors
• Max constrast: to distinguish colors
• Darken a bit: to see the result :)

Make radical changes to the colors of the bitmap

Transform to vector

Preliminary steps

• Open the Vectorizer tool, i.e. click on the Layout Tab -> Convert to Vector

The "mangled" bitmap doesn't need any color reduction in the vectorizer panel as you shall see.

• Click on Filter
• Set Transparent to "no color".

We now have 15 colors and can vectorize

Vectorizer settings:

• Sharpness and min area = minimum since we don't want to loose an information at this point
• Max error to 100, i.e. a compromise that will smooth some curves, i.e. create less control points, but not too few.

Vectorizer settings