Machine embroidery is an incredible way to beautify your garments. Whether it is a cap or a shirt, attractive design makes them appealing to everyone. Embroidery machine help you stitch intricate designs with ease.
Many brands use the embroidered logo on their garments. It helps beautify their fabrics and helps in branding without costing extra. When you are stitching embroidery designs on clothes, there are many steps involved. You will get appealing stitches when you follow all these steps carefully.
When you start with the logo’s embroidery, the first thing to consider is to digitize the logo. Illustrator being one of the top designing tools is quite helpful. In this article, you will know how to digitize a logo with an illustrator.
Let’s look at the digitization of a logo and the illustrator’s role in all this procedure. Meanwhile, you will get to know how to digitize embroidery logo with an illustrator:
What’s the connection?
Embroidery machines require a specific pattern (or, in other words, a set of instructions for stitching) created from a vector image. A vector image is a design that contains stitching details. If you have your designs but are not in a vector image, convert them first to get started with your embroidery.
You can import the graphics or designs into Illustrator, create a floating layer, and then redraw the drawings to a vector version once you have a vector version of the logo, options like using illustrator embroidery plug-in to change the image into an embroidery pattern. By this, your embroidery machine can use the design.
Let’s get started with how to digitize embroidery logo with an illustrator:
Choose the design:
The first step is selecting the logo. The image should be in a compatible format with illustrator. The size of the image matters. Because when you are choosing a large logo, it will take a long time to edit and digitize it.
The logo should be on a blank background, preferably black or white, for best results. The compatible formats are GIF, PNG, or JPG.
Select the tool:
Once you have imported the file into the illustrator, you can start the digitization journey using the Trace Preset tool. It is a unique tool that helps to deal with vector images. The tool name is Image Trace, and there are lots of preset options so the work can be done automatically.
You can use the specific tool which is necessary for your embroidery logo. You will get almost exact results when using suitable preset options. In embroidery, you need a design with clear lines and spaces, so it is easy to convert them into a format compatible with embroidery machines.
Color schemes:
You can do color preset so that it can get along with your embroidery later on. You will have options from:
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High and low fidelity photos:
Here you will get a detailed result but with less cleared vector images. It is not a good option for embroidery and logo designs.
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Three-colors, six-colors & sixteen colors:
These produced detailed and refined vector images. It is a good option for logos and embroidery.
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Grey shades:
Shades of grey produce a gray-scale image.
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Black and white logo:
Here you can create a logo that will need only two colors. But not affine vector image producer.
Once you have selected the color presets, open the logo image and activate the image options in illustrators and click it to begin.
Digitize the image:
Once you have clicked the button, it will go through the tracing process. You will find few changes in your logo as the traced version might be sharper. You can check the image by zooming in and zooming out.
Fine-tune:
Once it is done, open the Image trace option from the menu and fine-tune your logo. You can add more colors or add more details in this step.
Ungrouping colors:
As the last step for finishing, you must ungroup the colors to edit them. To do so, select the trace and click on expand button at the top. Now you will see all the shapes and each color divided by blue lines.
Afterward; right-click on the image and select ungroup option. You will see that your colors have been separated into layers in the Layers panel.
Edit colors:
Once colors are ungrouped, you can delete the whole group of color and add new. Moreover, you can fill in the colors you want.
You can select the whole group of colors by clicking on the shape and then choosing the same and the fill color.
It will determine the exact color groups, and then you can click on backspace (on the keyboard) and delete all of them. To fill the colors select the color by the same method and add colors using brush or pen tools.
Save the image:
After adding and deleting colors, you can now save your image. Your embroidery logo has been transferred into digital/vector format. Save the file into the form which is compatible with embroidery software.
Next steps:
Once your logo has been digitized, it is time to convert it into PES format. PES format means changing the digital file into a set of instructions for the stitching. PES format contains instructions like the total number of stitches are required, the colors of threads, etc.
We will not go into the details, but here is the summary of how you can do it:
- Import the illustrator image into embroidery software. Afterward, select the PES format and click on convert. The image will be converted automatically in PES format. Depending on your logo size, color combination, and design, it takes little time.
- Once it is complete, you can edit the image–as it is automatically transferred, the software sometimes changes the color or type of stitches you want. Edit and change the image accordingly and save it into the format compatible with your embroidery machines.
Let’s wrap it up:
Digitization seems complex, but it is fun. All you need is a little attention and persistence to follow steps correctly. You will learn like a pro about how to digitize the embroidery logo with the illustrator.
