Stencil Positive/Negative/Unweeded

[zahia salhi]

Hi All,

Merry Christmas to you all.

My question to all the experts out there:

How do you create various forms of a stencil pattern using Photoshop, Corel Draw or any other easier to use software.

I have attached examples of three images of what I want to achieve.

Many Thanks

[zahia salhi]

Please refer to these three pictures of an idea of what i want to achieve.

[George Brown]

I use corel draw's three point curve tool to manually trace it, not the fastest, but gives excellent results.

Corel also has automatic tracing tools that you may try.

[John Noell]

Here is a quick Corel X4 trace of your 2nd picture. No cleanup. Took <10seconds.

[zahia salhi]

Thanks guys,

But, Can someone be kind enough to post step by step instructions on how to achieve the three types of cuts using corel/photoshop from a single image pattern.

Many Thanks.

[Scott Shepherd]

That's asking for a lot. It's many steps involved and would take someone a fair amount of time to document it all. It's easy to do, but it's many steps. If you have patterns like this and need what you need, there are services that can do it for very reasonable prices. My guess is you can have all 3 of those examples done for about $20.

Google Vector Doctor and you'll have one guy I know of that does great work, really cheap. He's a pro at it, so what takes us 1 hour to do, he does in minutes. Might be worth a look.

[James Stokes]

It is not really complicated if you are using vinyl for a stencil. You do one drawing of it and just wead it for the look you want. If you are doing it for the laser it is the same thing, Make one trace of it and just change the fill colors to get the look you want.
Most of that particular patern is just a repeating patern, Trace part of it then duplicate as many times as needed and then flip them to get them the direction you want. You could get that pattern by tracing only 1/4 of it. It is a 5 minute trace if it is done by hand. Go to your Corel draw help manual and look up tracing. Also there are some very good tutorials on utube.

[George Brown]

Here is a quick Corel X4 trace of your 2nd picture. No cleanup. Took <10seconds.

Nice trace, will have to give corel auto tracing a second look. But most of my originals are not that clean, so the auto trace feature does not work that well.

[James Leonard]

Here is a link to the best tutorial I have seen on hand tracing with the CorelDRAW bezier tool. I use this for all my CNC work where I have to recreate shapes from a photograph.

http://macromonster.com/index.php?mod=descr&id_desc=5&

-James

[Paul Wesley]

Vector Magic does a great job of vectoring bmp jpg and now pdf. If your doing it on a regular basis it might be worth getting I know its saved me hrs of cleaning customers images.

[David Harvey]

browsing thru here today and caught this post and thought I would give it a try. I tried the trace in Corel, but it was not too good even after trying to clean up the image.

Then I brought it into Aspire and it took only a minute or so. Aspire made a difficult task 'child easy'...plus, for the fun of it, I brought it to life with some 3D and exported the model as a grayscale...now it can be lasered too.

I've attached the results for you to see (saved as X3 format)


too much fun here....back to work now.