Craft Artist Professional 2 – from Graphic to Cutting file

With the advent of CAP2 you can now take most of your crafting CD's and turn them into cutting files for use in your Cutter software. Depending on the cutter software you are using there are limitations as to what you can do, or how you need to prepare a file.

I am going to cover a range of techniques that will be of use to those of you that use cutting machines. I use a Pazzles Inspiration but many of the techniques shown are applicable to many other machines that use similar or the same software.

• Opening / Importing, Preparing and Exporting as SVG and JPG• Digikits• Graphics Files

These are the file types you can bring into CAP2

• PDF files

• Importing into cutter software

Start your CAP2 software

1. Select Blank Poject

2. Select A4-Portrait

3. at this point if you want to use an image from a Digikit simply select the digikit

4. click on the Add Digikit at the bottom of the pop up screen and then click on Done

5. You can now drag any of the embellishments from the left hand side of your screen onto the page and resize it to the size you require.

Now the next step may not be necessary for all Graphics but it is for some, so I find it easier to do it for all – otherwise you may get to importing your svg into your cutter software and find it does not work and then have to go back and do it all over again.

6. On the top menu bar go to Tools->Convert to Picture.... pop up box comes up simply click OK

7. Next go to the Right hand side of your screen and click on the Line Tab and select 0.1pt from the drop down list

8. Next go to the Colour Tab and select the line colour frame and select a colour of your choice (this will appear as your cut line).

Now you are ready to Export as svg

9. Make sur your graphic is selected and then go to File->Export->Export as Picture. Now on to the settings,

• in the Export Area select 96dpi• in the drop down box choose Selected Items if you only have a single Graphic (if you

have a page full then select Page)• In Poperties – Format: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) • and ignore the rest• Click on Export• Save the svg file to a location of your choice.

10.At this point it also worth Exporting again but this time as a JPG the same as above but in Properties Format: JPEG File (JPG), dpi 300 and save it with the same name.

Graphic Files

The process is much the same for any other individual graphic with the exception of getting the graphic onto your page.... so here's how.

11.Go to the top menu Insert->Photo->From File (to get file from a folder or CD) or Twain (to get image direct from your scanner)

12.Select a Graphic or Graphics to Insert into your page (you can select more than 1 by selecting the first and then holding down Ctrl key and selecting the next, etc.). Click on Open

13.You should now have the above on your screen and your mouse will be a + with a box, simply click on your page to insert each item.Now depending on the type of graphic you have Inserted you may have to process it in different ways:

• Transparent background such as png – simply process as we did for the Digikit embellishment above stages 6 to 10

• for a jpg/jpeg or graphic with a white background see stage 14

14.Select the graphic and go to Cutout Studio it will process your graphic and bring up the Cutout Studio box

15.Select the Discard Brush Tool (blue arrow), Brush Size medium (green arrow), Grow Tolerance 75 (red arrow). Now your mouse is a circle and wherever you click it it erases so you can erase the background. As you can see from my image above some bits have erased that I probably want to keep (dotted lines) do not worry we can put these back by selecting the Keep Brush Tool and the small Brush size.

16.By switching between the Keep and Discard Tools you can get a near perfect cut out. Once you have it how you want it click OK. Images with distinct contrast between background and image are the easiest to cut out.

17.This now gives you a cut out image that you can now apply stages 6 to 10.

Added function before applying stages 6 to 10 you can do this

18.Now I have cut out my two Graphics using the Cutout Studio they are on transparent backgrounds and I can therefore combine them to make another image.

19.Select both Graphics and then apply stages 6 to 10. This will give you a cut line around the two images as one.

One more type of Graphic file This is a sheet of images such as decoupage in jpg format

20.We are again using stages 11 to 16

21.Now I have got a Page of images and I can use the file like this and apply stages 6 to 10. However I can also split this into separate images. You can also at this stage drag any of the images onto the bar to the left to create Embellishments for a new Digikit.

22.Simply take the scissor tool from the top bar and cut into the page as shown above, you should now be able to select each piece individually. You can now rearrange your page duplicate pieces etc to make up a whole page of pieces to save paper. Now you can go through stages 6 to 10 either on individual pieces or on the page as a whole.

PDF Files

PDF Files are handles slightly differently to Graphics.

23.So for the PDF file we have to start a new project by simply going to File->Open, navigate to your file in a Folder or on CD and click Open at the bottom of your screen you will see a bar that says Importing PDF. This may take a little while depending on how many pages are in the PDF as it Imports them all as separate pages in CAP2

24.I have found that there is sometimes a blank layer over the top that needs to be removed (you can tell this by selecting the image and the bar with the Cutout Studio should appear if it does not try moving the image to one side it may be a blank layer).

25.Now Convert to Picture as in Stage 6.26.Now you can go to Stage 11 to 22 in stage 22 start from stage 7.

Importing into Cutter Software

Now that you have created your svg and jpg files we are going to look at Importing them into your cutter software.

For Pazzles users there are three options.• Pazzles Inspiration Pro 2010• MTC• SCAL 3.032

27. In both the Pazzles Pro and MTC softwares the options are much the same. Both these softwares will currently only import the Vector (outline part of the SVG file) - (Red arrow above). So if you are into creating new shapes to use in your cardmaking and scrapbooking it is great. You can use this in conjunction with the jpg file - (Blue arrow above) that I recommend saving in Stage 10 or you can simply use the jpg and Auto Trace for Print & Cut.

Before I start with this I am only a beginner with SCAL so there may be an easier way of doing this.In SCAL software you can Import the whole of the SVG file that is created in CAP2.

28. Open the SCAL software

29.Open the Layers screen – on the top bar Window->Layers

30.Click on the Import svg icon, select your file (it may just appear as lines) and click Open.

31. You can see you have Layer 1 and your image on separate layers.

32.Ungroup the Image – Select Image then select Object->Ungroup and now you have three layers, path, image and Layer 1. If you click on the eye on the image layer you can see just the cut line.

I have not tried this as I only have a demo version of SCAL at this point in time.

33.To prepare this for Print and Cut (the way I would do it in the Pazzles Pro software – see my Pazzles Print & Cut tutorial) you will need to:

1. create a separate Layer for each coloured box2. turn off the cut layer and print out3. load onto mat in your Pazzles machine4. turn off all layers except the first box and cut5. adjust Pazzles with arrow keys6. turn off first box layer and turn on second box layer and cut7. adjust Pazzles with arrows – repeat 6-7 as necessary8. tun off box layers and turn on cut layer and cut

I do hope Pazzles come up with a patch for importing the CAP2 svg files as it would be so much easier to do in Pazzles Pro software than SCAL.