I'm trying to give my images a grunge and smashed look to them. Odd thing is when I try to change the path to difference, it doesn't do anything. It's really strange. I looked on the main site FAQ section to see if this has been an issue in the past and I couldn't find much on it.

Any ideas?

When you say "images" do you mean photo images(raster) or vector objects?

I'm trying to understand what it is that you are doing. For example, if I draw a square and then take the calligraphy tool and draw a path right across it, then select my square first, hold shift key then select my path, I can do a path>difference just fine. Is that sort of what you are trying to do?

yoyo wrote:Odd thing is when I try to change the path to difference, it doesn't do anything. It's really strange.

Difference is not what you think it means if you're thinking of difference in photoshop or other raster applications where it effects the blend mode and colours. Difference is a way of combining two or more objects - http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... ining.html

Hmmm...I'm not sure what I was doing wrong before, but now it works. Lol. It's kind of strange. Initially I noticed that the program was giving me an error message on the bottom. It said that both objects I was selecting weren't path objects. To try and solve that problem I would click the caligraphy path I made and the text and went to Path > Object to Path. I was puzzled why even that wasn't working.

I guess what it comes down to is my understanding of paths. I've been exploring what I can do with them but I still don't completely understand all of the 'rules' behind them. Can someone explain to me exactly what a Path is? I understand the commands I can perform when I click on multiple objects and I understand I can add nodes to paths and alter curvature and whatnot, but other than that I don't really understand them.

This is probably the best explanation of paths and how to use them - http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Paths.html

You can think of a path as the lowest level of definition of a shape. ultimately all shapes are drawn via them, but things like circles, stars, rects etc use a shape layer to simplify the representation so you get the control handles that let you control attributes of the shapes rather than having to mess with raw nodes.

If you select a object then switch to node tool, and you get editable nodes its a path, if you get control handles like the circle star or rect ones, its being treated as a shape still. For text if its a path there'll be lots of nodes, if its still a text object there'll be one control point at the start of the object.

Thanks for all the help! I understand paths much better now