Digitizing your own Embroidery Designs Part 1

Happy Fall Everyone! I thought I would give all my lovely readers something great to start Fall, the 1st of October (my favorite month) and the weekend with, so without further ado, here it is!

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Before I start talking about the software used to digitize your own designs, and how to go about digitizing on your own, I need to talk about the first step in the process. And that step is getting the artwork, and then making it usable to be digitized. This is the most important step in the process, and if you do it correctly it will take the most time. The hardest part of the whole process is getting good artwork and tweaking it so that you will have no problems digitizing it using your choice of software later on. If you don’t do this step first your end results will most often end in frustration and disaster. I can not stress this point enough, if you don’t spend the time now getting your artwork in good shape before digitizing, you will spend hours and hours later trying to fix it.

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Don’t try to use bad or low resolution clip art you have downloaded off of some website somewhere on the internet, you won’t like your finished results. Try to make sure your artwork is clean and in a medium to high-resolution format. I usually like to start with something at least in the 300×300 pixel size range. Of course if you have some camera ready artwork of 1200+ pixels in size you should be in great shape and you should get some excellent results without much tweaking. The lower the resolution the item you are trying to digitize is, the more work you will have to do up front getting it ready to digitize.

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Of course you don’t need to have great camera ready artwork to start with. If you have a simple idea of what you want you can just sit down with a piece of blank white paper and sketch out a simple design of what you are trying to create. I’m no artist, so I usually try to use something that has already been drawn by someone else and go from there. But if you cannot do that, just sketch something simple onto a piece of plain white paper and either scan it in or take a photograph of your sketch to get it into your computer to get started on the cleaning up the bitmapped graphic before you begin the digitizing part.

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Here are a few photos to show you what I am talking about in the good art department.

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To the left is an original photo I found on the internet somewhere. I really wanted to use the Indy Mickey graphic for an embroidery design but I didn’t want to use the background since it is very complicated and it wouldn’t embroider well.

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The first thing I did was extract Mickey from the background graphic. I won’t be describing the exact process or software I used to do this since almost any graphics editing software can do this. Do a search on the internet for ‘remove a background from a photo’ and you find several great articles and tools on how to do this. Of course the most common graphics editors used to do this are Adobe’s Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. They are great tools to use for this, but they are a little expensive in my opinion.

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Once you have the graphic extracted from the background you should have something that looks like Image 1 below.

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This is a good start, but it still needs to be edited by hand a little more to remove more detail before going any further.

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The next step is an important one too. On most designs you will want a heavy black edge around the design so if you look closely at Image 2 you can see how I traced around all of the lighter lines around the border and the light grey colored areas to make them a thick dark black. This little bit of editing will give you a nice dark satin stitch around the border of your design once we get it digitized.

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Here is my edited image a little further on in the process.

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In Images 3 and 4 I am getting really close to the final bitmapped image that I will put into my digitizing software. You will notice that I have continued to edit the graphic until I have changed the hair and teeth on the golden idol to more solid colors rather than the individual fine lines that the original graphic had. I’ve also simplified the shoe strings and shadows on the shoes since at smaller sizes these would end up being unrecognizable blobs of knotted up thread.

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In Image 4 you can see I changed some of the colors in the graphic to other colors that already exist in the graphic to reduce the number of thread colors I would need to use when digitizing the graphic. The fewer colors you have  in your bitmapped graphic once it has been tweaked, the easier it will be to get a good digitized embroidery design in the end. Most graphic editing software has a feature to reduce the amount of available colors in a graphic image. It’s best to reduce the image you are working with to 256 colors or less before trying to digitize it.

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Well I hope that gives you a pretty good idea on how to get your original ideas, concepts and designs into your computer and get them into a condition that will work well for digitizing. The next step will be to get that graphic into your embroidery software and finishing the touching up and final digitizing of the design. I will cover that in my next how to: Digitizing your own Embroidery Designs Part 2.

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Part 2 of this series is HERE, Part 3 of this series is HERE.