Creating svg and dxf files

Can anyone suggest a good resource to teach me to create svg and/or dxf files from jpeg’s or png files? I am attempting to take an already made logo or photo and make it a vector file so I can import it into Inkscape or Fusion360. Any help would be great! Thanks? I am getting my CNC machine in two weeks and I want to be able to start using it right away.

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I don’t have any specific link to share, but the bitmap tracing features in Inkscape have been working fine for me when I had to convert an image into an SVG.

For example for this I used the latest Inkscape 1.0 (beta), it has a splendid “Autotrace” feature.

Most of the time, it’s as simple as opening Inkscape, import your bitmap, then go to the “Path” menu and select “Trace bitmap”, then play around with the various tracing modes/thresholds to get the result you want, or close.

Sometimes a little manual touch up is required. It all depends on the input image (a sharp/clean bitmap with lots of contrast will probably work magically, a dirty/noisy bitmap will be more difficult to vectorize)

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Here’s a pretty good resource explaining what @Julien mentioned. You should learn how to work with bezier paths in Inkscape because I find the auto-traced images almost always need the text cleaned up and beziers are the best way to do that. The link I provided discusses that a bit as well.

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Learning to draw with a vector drawing tool is several different skills:

We have a bit on the manual tracing at: https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Carbide_Create_Photo_Tracing and also see Logo re-creation: Carbide create help! and Carbide Create re-drawing — re-drawing with the curve tool and see https://inkscape.org/doc/tutorials/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html

c.f., https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Carbide_Create

If you get stuck on a file or project, post it here, or send it in to use at support@carbide3d.com and we’ll do our best to help.

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For simple files, you can use this on-line converter that works fairly well. It will take an image of a logo for example and convert it into a vector.

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I use Convertio <link> and it seems to be able to convert virtually anything to anything. I have been able to convert jpg, bmp and pdf to svg format without downloading any software or leaving my email address or signing up for anything.

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Someone on this forum posted the instructions for making an SVG in Inkscape. Inkscape is free and is a pretty robust image manipulation tool. I have been able to convert jpg, png and gif images successfully.

How to create SVG in Inscape

Open your image in Inkscape – select it
Click Path – Trace Bitmap – this will open a Trace Bitmap window
Click ‘Update’ to be sure image looks OK – then click OK and close window
You will now have 2 images - the top one is the traced image, move that one aside, select the bottom one and delete (My version of Inkscape does not have two images)
Be sure your new image is selected – click File – Save As - Choose type as Plain SVG – hit Save

You will now have an SVG file that “should” open just fine in Carbide Create

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I ran across this web site (https://www.vectorizer.io/) and it appears and works remarkably well. Black and white or color, most any image JPEG PNG etc. allows for customizing , removal of backgrounds and removal of extraneous tool paths. It’s free for a period then a very minor charge there after like $5.00 a month.
I generally use Google image to find the image, if you need a good black and white specify “line art”, then just save the image to your hard drive. Initiate Vectorizer ( https://www.vectorizer.io/), select the image you desire and it converts it into a svg. You can separate colors and shades of B/W/ color. Try it. Tom

I use the pen tool in Photoshop then export paths to Illustrator then save as SVG. You could do it all in Illustrator but I find it easier to just open any picture in Photoshop and start outlining. These programs were designed for production so there’s no clicking back and forth between tools needed. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for changing pen tool attributes like change direction of one handle or both and it’s very fast. They’re called points not nodes and he outline is called a path in these programs. Tips: zoom in to check your work. Imagine as you’re outlining that you’re driving down a road so in other words you are always pulling in the same direction as the road or outline. To really get the hang of it fast, outline the same complicated object 25 times and save each path. You will see the mistakes you made and what worked well. You can buy older legal versions of these programs like CS4 that have all the features you’ll ever need for very low one time cost on eBay etc and they are faster than new versions because they are not cloud based. Just check on google if that version will work with your operating system.

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Note that since this conversation was started, Carbide Create has gained a direct facility for image tracing:

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