Janome Embroidery Machine Experiment

The object of this experiment is to see how images translate from image editing software like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop into the Embird editing software.

Note: If you're just getting started with the machine and want to see how to embroider a jpg image, you probably want to take a look at the Embroidery Janome memory craft 200E Tutorial.

If you're like me and you're used to thinking in units like pixels or points, it's good to have some kind of reference for how the embroidery software and machine translate these units into stitches.  These tests compare printed material with embroidered material from the same file and what you can expect.

For now, I just want to see what the software will create by default.  Later on, I'll look at how you can manipulate a design in the software to gain more control over the embroidery output.

Step 1: Create the design in Illustrator

I started out with an Illustrator file.  You can of course skip this step if you want to start with Photoshop or Gimp or whatever.  When you create a new file in Illustrator, you can define the Artboard Setup.  The canvas area available to the embroidery machine is 140x140mm, so that's how big I made my Artboard.

The first test I wanted to do was to see how the embroidery machine handles different stroke widths.  This is what my test file looked like:

I need to convert this into a jpg so that I can open it in the Embird software.  Illustrator does have a "Save for Web" option, but it automatically crops the image and sets the resolution to 72dpi.  I wanted more control over the settings, plus I'm comfortable working in Photoshop, so I saved my Illustrator file, careful to select the "Create PDF Compatible File" option when saving so that Photoshop can open it.

Step 2: Open lllustrator file in Photoshop

Next I opened the file in Photoshop.  There are two important settings here:

1. The "Crop To" option is set by default to "Bounding Box".  This will ignore your carefully defined 140x140mm canvas area and chop off extra space around your image.  To be as accurate as possible and preserve the 140x140mm size, I selected "Media Box".
2. I played around with the resolution settings and discovered that a resolution of 127dpi will ensure the print size of 140x140mm is translated into the size of your image canvas in the embroidery software.  This seems like a really weird and arbitrary amount, so if anyone experiences any different results, let me know in the comments!

Once imported into Photoshop, my image size was 700px square and the print size was 140mm square.

Next I generated a jpg of my image with Photoshop's "Save for Web" option.  I selected maximum (100) quality.

Step 3: Open in Balarad Painter

Following Rachel's tutorial, I opened the design in Balarad Painter.  In the main menu, I went to Image > Resample... to check the dimensions of my test image.  It was 140x140mm, yay!  Of course it's possible to resize your image here, but then we have no reference between what we created in Illustrator and the actual embroidery.

Here's what it looked like in Balarad Painter:

I wanted the edges as defined as possible, so I selected Adjust > Smooth... and reduced the radius to 0.  Then I clicked "Compute Stitches".

If the operation is successful, Balarad Painter asks if you want to place the finished design into Embird Editor.  Yes!

Step 4: The design in Embird Editor

Here's what it looks like in the Embird Editor:

Notice that the 0.5pt stroke has not registered at all?

Also, notice the light grey hairy looking background?  This seems to be anti-aliasing artifacts picked up from the jpg.  I removed this with the Embird Digitizing Studio software in the next step, but you can also just skip this colour when you go to embroider the piece.  Perhaps this can be adjusted more easily in Balarad Painter with the Adjust > Contrast options?  I will test this.

Step 5: Edit in Embird Digitizing Studio

Next I right-clicked the image and selected "Edit in Embird Digitizing Studio".  This is how my test piece looked in the digitizing software:

Using the select tool (black arrow) I removed the hairy grey background, but I left the grey threads in the measurements along the top and on the top row of test strokes, just to see how this would look.

I then selected and resized the second and third rows of strokes, selecting and squashing the middle row and and stretching the bottom row.  Here's how it looked:

Notice the stroke second from the right in the bottom row, how part of the embroidery lines look messed up?  Who knows why the software does this, but you can see it later on in the actual embroidery, so this can be seen as quite a good preview.

The digitizing software also lets you select and delete single vectors (stitch points) and has a bunch of other options, but I'll examine those later.  For now, I've made all the changes I wanted to make, so saved my file in .eof file format.  Note: this is not the file I imported into the machine!  Then I selected Design > Compile and Put into Embird Editor.

Step 6: Export as a .jef file

From Embird Editor, you can save the file as a .jef file ready to load onto the embroidery machine.  In order for the embroidery machine to locate the file on your USB stick, you need to create a specific directory structure (EMB/EMBF/).  More about this and the steps required to load the design onto the embroidery machine are outlined in Rachel's tutorial.

Step 7: The Embroidery Results

So here's how it looks in embroidery:

I ended up using two colours only.  The grey "anti-aliasing" is only on the numbers and the top row of strokes.

The 1pt and 2pt strokes are embroidered identically.  The top row is deceptive here because the 1pt stroke has an extra line of grey anti-aliasing next to it.  The 0.5pt stroke didn't embroider at all.

Here's the embroidery compared to a print out from Photoshop.  Note: the squares at the top left and right are to indicate the corners of the 140mm wide canvas.

You can see that the embroidered piece is very close to the print, so very close to what we would expect.  It's about a millimeter out on the left and the right, and if you want to get really picky, you can see how removing the grey anti-aliasing lines has actually reduced the thickness of the lines.

Here's how the stretching and squashing affected the embroidery:

Notice the messy stitching on the stretched stroke?  We already saw this in the digitizing software.  If you're not stretching your digitized design, you don't really notice this at all.

Findings

The most important findings were:

• A jpg file with a canvas of 700px square and a resolution of 127dpi will open in Balarad Painter at 140mm square
• Stroke widths less than 1pt in Illustrator are not detected by the embroidery software
• Stroke widths less than 3pt in Illustrator will be embroidered as straight stitch, not "zig-zag"
• Anti-aliasing from the jpg compression is detected by the embroidery software even after reducing smoothing on the image
• If you want to be really accurate with stroke widths, make them about 1pt wider in Illustrator to account for width loss due to anti-aliasing.
• The software has a bizarre and not obviously logical way of calculating stitch patterns
• You can edit your designs in the digitizing software to get quite an accurate preview of what's going to happen with the embroidery

A few more tests

Ok, so this tutorial is getting really long, but I want to just show you three more tests I did: curves, fills and fonts.

Curves

Starting with a 1pt stroke width in Illustrator, I made curves of 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10mm in 1, 2, 4 and 8pt widths.  Here's how it looked in Embird Editor:

And here's the final embroidery piece:

Notice how the horizontal part of the curve is stitched horizontally, not with a "zig-zag" covering stitch, as you might expect.

Fills

For this test,  made 4 flat-colour filled squares.  The first has square corners, then 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10mm curved corners.  I put the measurements on the filled area to see how that would embroider.  I also made three gradients: vertical, horizontal and radial.  Here's the editor scan:

Notice the pale grey lines radiating out from the radial gradient?

I opened the file in the Digitizing Studio to edit out these lines:

I could select the whole vector path and then it's possible to delete single vector points.  The software doesn't handle this as nicely as Illustrator, but you can tidy things up a bit.

Here's the final embroidery:

The radial gradient is actually quite an interesting effect, as are the other gradients.

Fonts

Lastly, I had planned to test out some fonts from Illustrator, but seeing how the text in these other tests turned out, I decided to use the fonts available in the embroidery machine and the embroidery software.  The top three pale blue fonts are built in to the machine.  I embroidered them on the smallest possible setting.  There are good instructions for how to do this in the machine instruction booklet.

The bottom cream-coloured fonts are from the embroidery software.  There are tonnes of fonts available in the software, most of them novelty fonts.  It's possible to manipulate these in the software before exporting them to a .jef file format for embroidering.

Of course, it's better to see all this stuff for real, so I will leave a file containing all these tests at the FabLab.