A Miscellany of Useful Tips
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).
http://www.theperfecttitle.com/ (a great site to find interesting and different titles for your scrapbooking layouts, sorted by theme for easy searching)
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:
What’s the Purpose of the Mask?
Well, I finally looked it up today and it has a VERY useful purpose! As you know, in KNK Studio, you can create an outline (shadow mat) using Tranform>Outline. Up on the Smart Bar, you will find an icon on the far right which you can indent for masking or outdent to leave off. Masking, in essence, is used for creating a single welding outline when there is more than one image selected. With the Masking off, the outlines will remain individual. That’s it!
Lynn G reported another related discovery this morning: if you initially have only selected one object for the Transform>Outline but then click on other images, the outline will be applied to each one.