DSF

A few programs I've used recently that I'd like to share:

Portrait Professional - Clever program to get rid of blemishes and imperfections, can't do much for me though!

CrossFont - I used this to enable our Macs at work to read PC fonts and vice versa.

Vector Magic - My personal favourate, fantastic vector conversion, very powerful and fast.

Please add links to your faves, anything of interest etc.

Justin

Like the look of the Vector Magic site, I will have to wait until I have time to have a go tho. But what a good idea to add links. Unfortunately I have nothing to contribute at the moment.

Vector Magic is excellent for doing the quick stuff and ideal for embroidery, but can't compare to a good manual trace in Coreldraw or Illustrator.

John

I've never really got on with Coreltrace. I shared an office with a couple of very experienced mac designers a while back and Vector Magic put both them and the macs to shame on several occasions! I've thrown some very detailed and also poor images at it and it never fails me. Occasionally you might need to tweak a little but that's only to be expected I guess.

I'm no designer so the simple interface works well for me. I'm still trying to get my head around Adobe The online Vector Magic is good to try it out but the desktop version is far better and quicker.

Justin

I had a look and uplift a image and it looked good, quick, is that simple to use. I would buy the programme but reading the post it says it would help if you use it for embroidery, in which way and in simple terms please. I have Illustrator but have no idea how to use it, or ever use it but would love to. Its a pity your not down this part of the world John I would be quite happy pay you for lessons

http://www.lynda.com/

Take a look at this site, very impressive.

Justin

I use Vector Magic quite a lot and have done for quite a while. It is good as auto-tracing goes BUT, it's not nearly as good as a good manual trace. If you zoom in on a trace done by Vector Magic, Coreldraw or Illustrator, you'll see that what should be nice continuos curves, aren't. There will be deviations etc. If you're using the auto-trace to produce cutting lines any imperfections will be visible in the final product. Sometimes you might have to look closely, but they are there.

Here's a good video on manual digitizing in Coreldraw

John[flash=425,350:3g98nna5]http://www.youtube.com/v/1PyRu_hSUW8[/flash:3g98nna5]

So why's it good for embroidery?

First of all Jenny, you have to understand that an embroidery pattern is made up of lots of objects - a circle is an object, so is a square and all the other shapes. Each object is assigned a type of stitch and colour. This is a simplistic explanation but when you understand the concept of object (vectors instead of bitmaps), you'll get it

Embroidery objects don't need the same degree of accuracy as say, vinyl cutlines because you will never produce embroidery with that much accuracy.

Hope that helps.

Best Software Deals?

I found Photoshop Elements 8 for under £60 (not student version) which I thought seemed ok. I wonder how many of us would use all of the features in CS3?

Also found Corel X3 for £33 which seems a little too good to be true. 4 original disks and activation key.

Justin

Justin, someone told me just today that X3 won't work under Cista or Windows 7!!!

Is this true?

John

I intended sticking with XP for some time yet so shouldn't be a problem! I have X4 as well but havn't managed to get this working as well with the sublimation.

Wasn't aware of that though...I wonder what else won't be compatable?

Justin