hi guys my name is josh i'm going to be going over a quick tutorial on a program called inkscape which is a open source software similar to vector magic which allows you to convert a jpeg over to a vector image now if you don't know what a vector imagine a jpeg is basically a jpeg is something you download off the internet very basic image it's a raster file that you would edit in a photoshop or a software something like that or like a microsoft paint it could take a png file a jpeg file lots of the common file types and transfer into a vector now jpeg looks something to this image here when you zoom into it it has very jagged edges when you make into a vector image no matter how far you zoom in it's very smooth now we want to use that for any kind of cnc or any kind of laser engraving machine the key is when you have it set the image into like a master cam program or any kind of cut studio program like coreldraw maybe with the laser engraving machine at the college you want to have a very clean image so when you make a g-code from that image it's not going to be jumping around everywhere it'll have clean edges and it's going to make it look a lot nicer so some of you may be familiar with vector magic it is a paid software and it is very expensive this option here inkscape is an open source software which if you're not familiar basically a community comes together and creates a software it's community edited community created and it's free to use when you want to download yourself just go to google and give a quick search to inkscape now i've done a little research in the program there's a bit of community around it ready for support with tutorials on youtube you know it's on cnet's website i downloaded it off the cnet website it's something i trust uh so quickly gives you a quick tutorial on her instructions and what the program does how big it is it's about a gigabyte once you actually install it and this is where you can download it as well so this is inkscape we'll get started uh one thing you might notice with the program it looks very familiar if you have like a microsoft paint or like a photoshop what you see in the image here is just giving you a reference for a eight and a half by eleven sheet now you can set up that sheet by going new and you have a whole bunch of different defaulted stuff you might be using it for whether it be like a dvd cover or like an a4 sheet working with an a4 sheet now now you'll notice on the left hand side you have your select tool which allows you to select and transform objects very similar as you would in paint or photoshop you also have drawing tools like circles you have all your colors down at the bottom here you can draw images now i wouldn't use this software per se to actually draw anything uh you have a much stronger software as in photoshop or which is a free version of like photoshop what we're going to be doing this software strictly at least the college anyways we're going to be using it to convert jpegs over to factor images to begin we want to go to file and import now we don't want to go to open new or i think that we want to import because we want to import an object so my file is on my desktop this jpeg image here and it's a very small file it's only 4.71 kilobytes and it's 260 173 pixels it's a very small image when you zoom in on it it's quite small so we're going to import it in here and you want to go embedded not link the key to embed it is allows us to actually edit it link won't allow us to edit it go okay and your image is in there you can use your select tool move it around make it bigger so once you make it bigger you notice how you have those blurry edges again so we want to get rid of those blurry edges we're going to make sure our object is selected then we'll go to path and we want to choose trace bitmap okay everything set up in here allows you to do it to create the vector very smooth make it kind of a smaller file you can change the thresholds and the edge detection and the options as well but you'll have a very large file and i mean sizes isn't a big issue so i mean you can if you have a google drive or a usb stick it's not a big issue but we have a lot of images it kind of piles up so keep it the way it is here it's the easiest to go click ok and we're pretty much done when you move your image you're going to find you have two images now you have one new vector and as far as we zoom in we'll go 348 times zoomed here now and you can see very very clean lines no matter how far i'm actually zoomed in went a little too far there versus our jpeg which you can see it's blurry and even we're only at 148 zoom in here and i haven't actually resized it yet it's very blurry so we're going to get rid of that and delete it just have to delete on the keyboard go back to about 100 and then you can resize it here resize it anywhere else it won't really matter when it's a vector allows you to resize it pretty much anywhere then you're just going to go regular save save as as you normally would save it in your folder of choice and you're pretty much good to go if you have any other questions guys i'm a fourth year student to college or you can contact me with my information at the end here you can also visit my website at stem.msats.ca for more tutorials and information alright guys take care