The title tells the tale.

Preparing an image for Sign Cut Pro to cut out of 2 colors (black and red) vinyl

First cash paying customer wants me to create a banner for him. He gave me a high res image to use. Well his high res image looks like a high res scan of a drawing done on a napkin. Grainny, Wobbly, not a straight line on the drawing. Speckled, not a solid color on the image.

I am a little new to Inkscape, however somewhat talented with Paint Shop Pro, still this is alot of work, that some filter, or add-on can probably handle and make this short work.

Anyone on here willing to hod my hand on this one? I cleaned this one up a bit and reduced the size to fit the upload requirements.

Thanks
JOhn ><>

Well, I'm not sure if Path menu > Trace Bitmap would work for you.....? Although there might be a way to configure the settings to get the kind of results you need. I don't know exactly what they would be, except by trial and error. But others might.

If I understand how these cutters work, the quality of the color shouldn't matter. Doesn't the machine cut along the paths? So all you need is to smooth out the paths, right? You could try Trace Bitmap, then use Path menu > Simplify. So even though the trace might still result in squiggley lines, Simplify could get rid of them.

Other than that, I think you're destined to do a lot of "manual" straightening out of the lines. But definitely wait for more replies, to get other ideas, before diving in. Good luck!

Tried the Trace Bitmap option and it drew a circle around EVERY hole in the image. Edges jagged and the cut preview showed them all.

JOhn ><>

What settings did you use for Trace Bitmap? Did you see the Smooth checkbox? Did you see the Options tab, with Smooth Corners, Suppress Speckles, etc.? Did you try adjusting the Threshold and Tolerance values? After you did the trace, did you use Path > Simplify? However your problems are fixed, I don't think they will be a quick fix. It's going to take some experimentation with Trace Bitmap, or maybe a lot of manual work.

If you want to upload your SVG, I'll be glad to play around with it, and see what I can do. Or someone else might come along who knows a better solution. But again, regarding the "holes" and circles around them -- afai understand cutters, you could just delete them. Isn't it the shape's outline that you want?

I would use a guitar .svg file from openclipart.org... They are public domain, so just download a gutiar similar to the one you have and make your changes in inkscape.. done..

http://www.openclipart.org/search/?query=guitar

this is much faster than the >path >trace bithmap feature and the quality of the .svg creations are likely much nicer than the image you have, but you can always 'dummy' down the openclipart.org svg file as you see fit.

-vw

did you ever get any thing to work - i see that you have been after this vector for a while in a few diffrent forums - if you need help still email me and i will do it for ya