by Sandy McCauley | Sep 7, 2009 | Links, Silhouette, Stuff that's scrap book related, Tracing
Today’s thank you’s go to Sherri S and to Kaleigh C for ideas on how to find images for auto-tracing in KNK Studio.
Someone at one of the Yahoo groups was looking for football images. Now normally, I would send them to Picsearch or to Google and then perform the search and click on Images. But Sherri did it one better… she googled on: Football Silhouette. The following two screen shots illustrate the difference in what you get:
Search Results on "Football"
Search Results on "Football Silhouette"
Obviously the second search yields much better/easier images for auto-tracing due to the black and white nature of the images and also the simplicity in the detail.
So, I was relating this find to my friend, Kaleigh S, who told me that she enjoys locating free coloring book images and does a similar search, except uses “coloring book” in place of “silhouette”. Here are the results from that search:
Search Results on "Football Coloring Book"
Again, you get black and white images and, even better, different images from the first search. Now, auto-tracing these images will results in double lines, but those are fairly simple to edit out and it’s worth using this “coloring book” search in case the images you originally find are not quite what you are needing for your personal project.
As always, tracing these Internet images does not make them yours to share or sell without the permission of the original designer. You’ll need to hunt down the Terms of Use or contact the original designer if you want to do more with them. But for your own personal use, have fun!
by Sandy McCauley | May 18, 2008 | Links, Mask, Outlining Images, Shop Palette
I had several new things that popped up this weekend, so I think I’ll just cover all three in one post:
(1) A couple of new links to recommend:
http://www.picsearch.com/(type in anything you are seeking and it will find images all over the Internet with that name in the file… great for finding images to trace).
Coloring Page of the Day: see the bottom of my blog for the link. While these aren’t vector pdf’s, they do import easily into KNK Studio and yield some great tracing results, using default settings. Check back every day to see if you can use the latest image. Also note the site has past coloring pages arrange by theme to download.
(2) A GE owner had been playing around with the Shop Palette and inadvertently saved her new configuration as the default. I’ve done this myself and I’m not sure what happened, but there is a fix. First of all, try clicking on the
Context Menu icon on the
Shop Palette (it’s the one with the three little dots). In that menu, click on Reset and see if the original palette is restored. If not, then you need to replace a file called factorydefault.pal with the original… which can be downloaded from:
https://www.iloveknk.com/ImportantFiles/KNKStudioFiles/. Simply save this file into c:\Klic-N-Kut Studio (or whichever folder contains your KNK Studio installation). Answer OK or YES when asked if you want to replace the existing version. Open KNK Studio and you should have the original restored.
(3) One of the readers here asked for an example showing masking. I thought about it and the best example that came to mind would be file where you have several objects that are different colors and you want to create an outline around those objects, but retain their original colors (Let’s say you want to cut Happy Birthday from different colors of cardstock and have the letters adhered to a mat). In the
Transform>Outline window, make sure both of the icons on the far right are indented:
Keep Original and
Create Mask. Create your outline and after closing, you will, for some reason, have a duplicate of your original images in the new trace color. Simply delete it and you will also have your originals in the individual colors. In the following figure, I show the three steps: the individual letters colored, the image right after closing the
Transform>Outline window, and finally the result after deleting the copy of the letters that gets created and placed on top of the originals:
