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Clever Someday

create smart

Centerline trace with Rapid Resizer

March 4, 2014 by Kay

I’ve covered Rapid Resizer before but I want to go into more detail on one of its most useful features, the centerline trace. Let’s say we want to take a line drawing and sketch it with gel pens in our diecutter. If we trace it in our cutting software we will get a double line trace, and our sketch will not look natural. What we need is a way to trace down the center of the line. Rapid Resizer gives us an easy way to do this.

cltracedolphins

Written steps follow.

Find an image you want to trace. I picked this coloring book image of dolphins and downloaded it.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 2.58.37 PM

Next I opened the Rapid Resizer Raster to Vector Online Converter and clicked the Choose File button and navigated to the image I just downloaded. Select centerline trace from the first pulldown box and SVG from the second (you can also choose DXF if you do not have Silhouette Studio Designer Edition or another program that can open SVGs). Click the trace button.

rrcltrace2

If you chose SVG, you will see the results of the trace on the next screen. Right click to choose Save File or go to the File menu and choose Save Page As (this may vary slightly depending on your browser) and name and save the SVG to the location of your choice.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 2.58.13 PM

Open the SVG in your cutting software and prepare to draw as you would any other SVG sketch file.

To use these SVGs in Cricut Design Space choose vector upload.

Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 8.44.55 PM

While Rapid Resizer is the easiest way I’ve found to do centerline traces, it is limited and won’t work well on all or even most images. The best centerline tracing options are Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, but there are a couple of other free options. Kristy over at Craftermath has tutorials for the Autotrace web app and for Win Topo.

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Class of 2014 free SVG
Become a Knife Tool Ninja

Comments

  1. Kaitlyn Jay says

    March 5, 2014 at 6:33 am

    Worked brilliantly – thank you so much!

  2. Pauline purdum says

    March 5, 2014 at 7:28 am

    Brilliant nice to have workarounds to limitations in our software.

  3. Karen L says

    March 5, 2014 at 11:36 am

    You are a genius! Thanks so much for this link and tutorial that I will be sure to add to my collection for reference. Please add this to the facebook group The Silhouette Challenge.

  4. 1cardcreator says

    March 5, 2014 at 1:55 pm

    Thanks so much for sharing this, I have pinned it too! ~Diane

  5. trishreddick says

    March 6, 2014 at 10:11 am

    Oh my goodness, I am so excited to learn about this tool! There have been so many times I have needed this. I am going to pin it and then go try it. You are crazy smart and I am so glad to have you in my virtual world! Thank you very much dearie!

  6. Barbara Ford says

    March 8, 2014 at 3:48 pm

    You are an incredible person. You are brilliant and willing to share your brilliance–an uncommon combination, frankly.

  7. Jessica says

    August 2, 2014 at 2:49 pm

    Assistance please, I found an image and followed your steps. When it comes to saving it, I have tried clicking on file to save as and also right click over image with mouse and it does not give me the option neither. Any suggestions?

    • Kay says

      August 2, 2014 at 6:07 pm

      Jessica,
      As I said in the video, the commands vary from browser to browser. Try whatever save options you have or Google how to save a page in your browser.

Trackbacks

  1. April Showers Sketch Pen Printable | Please Excuse My Craftermath… says:
    April 14, 2014 at 4:20 pm

    […] – both free programs that can do single stroke tracing!  Kay Hall from Clever Someday has one on Rapid Resizer you could try as […]

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