PPPS - GIMP (and presumably Photoshop) have tools that will make turning a full color image into a pure black and white image easier, but their learning curves are steep.If you’re an Adobe Illustrator user, please see How to Convert Handwriting to Vector Art in Illustrator. PPS - You’ll want to practice the Inkscape tutorials in the Tips and Tricks section. PS - Once Glowforge Support sees this thread they will move it somewhere else as they do not consider design questions part of their bailiwick. However you get there, once you have your outline import your same-sized png file, place it over the outline and now you can engrave the image and cut it out. That said, it can take some time to do this and maybe your image is good enough to just go straight to Path -> Trace Bitmap without any image manipulation. A bitmap with only two colors makes life a lot easier for the software and your results much better. Now import your black and white image into Inkscape and do a Path -> Trace Bitmap. For example, if you have an image of a trout, the trout would be solid black and everything around the trout would be white. Want you want is a more or less solid black image surrounded by white. Color every pixel outside the image white.

Open the copy in Microsoft Paint (or GIMP or Photoshop) and color every pixel in the interior of the image black. If it doesn’t need to be resized then skip this step.

If you do want an exact as possible outline of your image to be cut, and you’re not having much luck with the Path -> Trace Bitmap feature, my suggestion is import it into Inkscape, resize it and then do a File -> Export PNG image. If you go the trace route it will take some messing about with this feature possibly a lot of messing about. Inkscape can do some basic manipulation with a raster, like resize it by dragging one of its handles or by going to Object -> Transform and using that dialog to resize it.Īs for cutting out around it your two basic options are 1) make an object it will fit into using the create rectangles and squares, the create circles, ellipses and arcs or the create stars and polygons tool (which is what marmak3261 linked to) or 2) trace it and hope for the best using the Path -> Trace Bitmap feature. The glowforge can engrave a raster, several different ways, but all it can do to it is engrave it. A png is a raster, which just means it is a bitmap or a collection of pixels.

How to turn a png into vector inkscape