Page 15

20387AG

AUTO VS HAND DIGITIZING NOTES There are 2 different schools of thought on digitizing. The first is that all designs should be created by hand. When I say that, I mean that you personally choose each stitch and engineer their placement in the design. You control everything from stitch length to direction, and the amount of colors. You can also work with any type of artwork, whether it’s clip-art or a sketch. An integral part of digitizing is learning to adapt your stitches to the artwork. For example, if you have a scan of a star with an outline as your background, the outline may appear thin and difficult to stitch. When you trace over that section, you can actually over extend your outline so that it is thicker. This is all possible when using manual digitizing techniques. Automatic digitizing is the other type. When you auto-digitize a design you simply select the artwork and the computer does all the work. You click and stitch. Automatic digitizing has been around for 20 years, and I am just as skeptical about it now as I was then. To me, it takes all of the art and nuance out of a design and the end result looks like cartoon style clip-art, at best. Another huge requirement with auto-digitizing is that you need perfect artwork. The better the art, the more likely you are to have good results. Another trick to automatic digitizing is that you really need to be an expert digitizer to use it. This is something that is never really explained to people that would like to create their own designs. How would you know if something has gone wrong or if a design could have been created better if you didn’t know what it is supposed to look like in the first place? I have been digitizing for over 20 years now, and I do not use, nor have I ever used auto-digitizing in any of my designs. I find that with just three different stitch types I can digitize any design there is. With that being said, there are tools built into software these days that make it easier and easier to manually digitize designs. So, I may use auto-features in software to allow me to digitize a design quicker, but I will never sacrifice control of a design to a computer.


20387AG
To see the actual publication please follow the link above