how do i put a hairline around an image for a contour cut?

[Chris Wool]

there are shorter cuts for some things but learn to digitise and you would have done it quicker than putting it on here.

chris

[Steve Radford]

I’ve just traced it using the Bezier tool and it took me 12 minutes, and with practice I can see it coming down to at least 5 minutes, maybe less.

It’s very frustrating when you have such cool tools as the magic wand and magnet tool in Photoshop and these things take 2 seconds to do!

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t wasting away my time tracing it by hand if a simple click of the mouse using a tool in CorelDRAW would do the trick.

[Steve Curry]

If you have cut it out in photoshop and have it on a transparent background, go to help at the top and you should see export transparent image, follow the wizard and this will save an eps file with a vector trace around the outside. It normally needs simplifying in a vector package afterwards but its a starting point.

[Steve Radford]

Brilliant, thanks, that’s what I was looking for, why it’s buried under the help menu as appose to the file menu is beyond me, but we got there in the end…well almost!

It now has a trace outline around the outside, however I can’t seem to select and change this to a CutContour line in CorelDRAW? I have my CutContour setup in my palet and have used it with success on other stuff. I just can’t seem to select and change the hairline colour whatsoever?

Any ideas???

[Ramj]

Is the shape layer locked?
the shape will just be filled… so maybe its something to do with applying a stroke in corel?

I found with importing anything from an adobe product into corel I had a host of different little difficulties

Also, if you did need to specify a path that isn’t just the transparent background, you can use the vector tools in photoshop, including using the magic wand, right clicking and selecting convert selection to work path, and then open it up in illustrator(if you have it) and use that as a cut path,

P.s, not really of use to you personally
I personally use the vector tools in photoshop when using quark, as it can automatically detect the vector path and wrap text around,

[Hugh Potter]

is this what you’re tryig to do ?

pen tool and shape tool took about 5 mins tops,

i dont do print so forgive me if i’m wrong 😮

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Attachments:

flower thing cdr12.cdr

[Steve Radford]

Thanks. I too hand traced it as I mentioned above, I was just looking for an automated way of doing this, without wasting 5 minutes everytime I need a CutContour outline.