help please

[GRAMSAM]

Hi everyone
I would appreciate it if someone could help me out here
I am at the moment running a trial version of corel x7
I do a lot of airbrushing and i am going to buy a small laser cutter so i can cut out stencils
what i would really appreciate if some one could explain to me how can I in corel
import an image and set it out so its in layers for me to cut out and use as stencils
any help on this matter would be really appreciated
I am not that clever on the pc so if anyone can help me please make it simple to understand

thanks everyone

Graham

[jaydear]

To me, a laser cutter sounds like overkill for cutting stencil paper - have a look at http://www.rolanddg.com/product/cutt...-24/index.html as a starting point. Of course, if you're cutting brass or stainless steel sheet you'll probably need a laser cutter! I used to use a Roland DG CAMM-1 cutter which could produce small or large re-useable stencils from CorelDRAW v8/v10/v12 drawings, as well as cutting vinyl signage, which is what I mainly used it for.

I'm digging into my memory-banks now... I recall that the CorelDRAW files I made had to have zero-width lines for the Roland cutter to follow, and I think they had to be exported as .PLT files, the type used to drive an HP x-y plotter. Bitmaps are of no use at all to cutters as they need outlines. CorelDRAW had heaps of useful output file formats to use for just about any graphic purpose.

I seldom used bitmaps as a starting point, but it was a relatively straightforward procedure in CorelDRAW to manually trace a bitmap using layers, e.g. to reproduce a logo from a photo. Forget about auto-tracers too, you'll spend as long cleaning up their output as you would just doing it manually in the first place. You could also have a look at 2D CAD software in conjunction with a digitising tablet, e.g. Intuos. Note that I haven't done any cutting for many years - CorelDRAW v12 was the last version I bought and I haven't used the Roland cutter since then.

I also recall that Roland DG had their own software to use with their various plotters and cutters, and I think it was not cheap (but neither was CorelDRAW). I had a pretty good affinity with CorelDRAW from v3 onwards and my use of it was a 'work-around' I developed for my purposes which functioned well enough most of the time. Whether later versions of CorelDRAW than v12 have the same capabilities, I cannot say as I now use Xara DPX11, but not for cutting anything. My focus changed years ago.

Whatever software and hardware combination you choose will have to be suitable for the artistic and mechanical tasks ahead. Sorry, but if you are not clever with PC's it's going to be a very long, bumpy road and you'll need to find specific help and/or attend courses specific to your goal. Be prepared to spend a lot of money trying various combinations of software and hardware to achieve a working system you like and understand and that does not confine your artistic talent. Good luck with it.

[gwpriester]

Thanks for that. I knew we had some knowledgeable CorelDRAW users or former users.

[jaydear]

My pleasure. I love CorelDRAW and CAD generally, but it's too pricey to keep updating when you're pretty much retired. Xara DPX11 satisfies my needs now as well as replacing Frontpage and there's still a link to Corel from the early Xara days . Plus it gives me something to learn

[theinonen]

Normally I would agree about autotracers, but with these types of images those would actually work quite well. Stencils are pretty much just outline images and there are some excellent outline tracers for turning bitmap images to vector.

Trick is not to have too many colours and some programs have posterise and clean up options to help with preparing the image. When reducing colour depth with bitmap software, it should be done without any dithering as the cleaner the image without extra noise, less shapes the resulting vector image will contain.

Below is an autotrace example made from Cocal Cola logo in PNG file format. (Taken from Wikipedia.) Colour depth was reduced to 1bit and then autotraced with Image Outliner with almost default settings and as can be seen, it will look pretty much identical and just pressing button is in this case obviously much faster than tracing it manually.


(Little tip: If you have black and white outline images, then watermark is not very good way to protect those as it will disappear when reducing colour depth and the resulting image will trace just fine.)

[jaydear]

I agree that one bit logos are practical to prepare with CORELtrace or maybe even the auto-trace in DPX11, but we don't know what sort of image the OP is talking about. Since he's airbrushing several stencils per job he may be starting with multicolour bitmaps, e.g. faces, scenes, cars, etc., but we're just guessing now.

GRAMSAM, can you post a typical sample image and let us know how many stencils you would use to airbrush it?