v4 Archives

Posted on April 3, 2018April 26, 2023 by silhouettesecretsplus — 38 Comments

Let’s Explore v4 – Transform Panel – Align

Today we are exploring the Transform Panel – Align Tab.

This is a very important and useful panel when you are creating designs & one I use almost every time I open the Silhouette software.

The Transform Panel is on the right side of Silhouette Studio v4 and the first tab on this panel is the Align Tab.

Let’s take a look at the entire Align tab.

Center – This icon is the Center to Page and it will center the design in relation to the Page Size you have set under the Page Setup Panel – Page Size. Here I have resized my design (Softball Mom by SM Designs) and then hit the Center to Page icon and it centered that to my 12″ x 12″ page size.Then you have the Center multiple objects icon. When multiple objects are selected, this will center those objects to each other. If I draw a circle and select both objects, click on the center multiple objects, it will center those designs
Horizontal – There are 3 options here: (A) left edge, (B) center, (C) right edge. (Dots Nice – A Dotty Handwritten font by One Oak Designs)
Vertical – There are 3 align options here: (A) top, (B) center, (C) bottom edge. (SG Beach Vacay Dingbats Font by Sophie Gallo – Design #240727)
Horizontal Spacing – With multiple objects selected (more than 3), this will space those objects equal distance apart horizontally.
Vertical Spacing – With multiple objects selected (more than 3), this will space those objects equal distances apart vertically.

And there you have the details of the Align tab in the Transform Panel of Silhouette Studio v4. Now, there is no need to eye-ball the spacing or alignment, let the software do the work for you.

You can also find the same icon in the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) at the top when more than one object is selected.

Check out the other posts in the Let’s Explore v4 Series HERE.

Save this for future reference by pinning the image below.

I would love to see what you are creating with your Silhouette machine. Feel free to post on my Facebook group Silhouette Secrets with EllyMae. If you have questions feel free to post below or on the Facebook group too!

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Posted on March 13, 2018April 26, 2023 by silhouettesecretsplus — 35 Comments

Let’s Explore v4 – Text Style Panel

Let’s talk about text – the Text Style Panel!

Silhouette Studio software will pull in any font that you have installed on your computer. Once it’s installed, a text style name should show up in the Text Style Panel.

Let’s take a look.

Text Search bar – The name of the font that is selected will appear in this box or you can highlight it and type a name in the box and it will select that font.
Text Size – Use the drop down box to change the text size smaller or larger here or highlight and type in a new number to change the pt size.
Text Style Panel – The first 2 sections to appear in the Panel are the “Frequently Used” and “Recently Used” sections. You may have other sections in the Panel because you’ve created folders in your Fonts folder in the Silhouette cloud library. When you choose a font style for your text, the font style name will be highlighted.
Text Properties – If a font has the options, choose Bold, Italic or Underlined here. Some text styles may have additional options available and the drop down box next to U will be available to select.
Text Alignment – Choose your text to be align left (default), align centered, align right or Full.
Horizontal/Vertical Text – Choose whether your text runs horizontally or vertically on your design mat.
Line Spacing – Increase or decrease the space between each line of text. This will affect text created in the same text box.
Character Spacing – Increase or decrease the spacing between each character. This can come in handy when you are trying to weld something and the letters do not overlap.
Kerning – This feature adjusts the spacing between letters to make them look better, such as AW or AV. Instead of having such a wide space between then, you can turn the Kern on and they move closer together.

Now, let’s talk a little about how to create with Text.

First click on the Text Tool on the left side of the Silhouette Software. Click on the design mat & type out the words. Click off of the words to deselect it and then click back on the text once to select it. Fill the text with color to make it easier to see & work with. Click on the Text Style Panel on the right side.

Now, click on a Font Style Name, the text will change to that font style. You can then either click on each font, use the text search bar if you know what you are looking for or use the arrow keys to scroll through the text list and as you do the words will change to each font – this is my favorite method if I don’t know what font I want.

You will notice that I have red lines still going through my letters. Because my letters are overlapping, I want to weld this before I cut so that it will cut anything part that overlaps as one piece. Right click on the design and choose Weld.

This will change the text from editable text to a vector image, so you might want to make a copy and pull it off your mat before welding. Once it’s welded, you will see that any piece that was not overlapping will have now become it’s own separate section with a bounding box around it.

To keep the pieces together, we want to Group. There are several ways to Group – right click & choose Group, Ctrl (Cmd) + G, Object tab at top & Group or use the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) at the top and select the Group icon.

And now your font is ready to cut.

I hope that helps to explain the different parts of the Text Style Panel and how to create text designs.

If you want to learn even more about text and how to get accurate text sizes, check out my guest post on Silhouette School’s blog about Forcing Accurate Text Size.

Check out the other posts in the Let’s Explore v4 Series HERE.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Posted on March 6, 2018April 26, 2023 by silhouettesecretsplus — 3 Comments

Let’s Explore v4 – Pixscan Panel

Now you may have noticed I skipped an icon as we were going down the right side of the Silhouette software. I wanted to get through the Tracing panel before we explored the Pixscan, since we will be using that feature here.

The Pixscan Panel can be very useful if you are scanning an object such as a stamped image or design off of a piece of scrapbook paper.

Here is how the Pixscan works:

Gather your images you want to scan and place them on your Pixscan mat inside of the rectangle border.
Take a photo of your Pixscan mat or use your Scanner to gather your image.
Click on the Pixscan icon in the top right corner of the software.
Then you will choose Import PixScan Image from File and select your photo from where you have saved it. My software gave me the notice that “No Calibration Profile could be found….” and I tried to create a calibration file, but was unable to. I have an iphone 6s and it was not recognizing that, but I’ve still been able to get successful cuts even with this notice. This may not work for everyone.
Click on Continue without Calibration and then be patient as it loads up the image onto your software mat.
Next, trace or draw shapes around the images on the design mat.
Once there are cut lines, either by tracing or drawing shapes, click on the Send tab and set the cut settings by choosing your material. You will notice above, there is one image on my mat that has no cut lines. When I did the trace on the monkey, while he is cute, he was not a very good image to trace around as he had edges that were not closed. He could still be used, however, would require a bit of extra manipulation of edit points in order to do so.
Now, load the mat. Make sure that your rollers are on the edges of the mat and you have lined up the left edge with the blue line on the left.
Now, cross your fingers and Click on the Send button. The Cameo will begin by reading the registration marks on the mat with the Optical eye, this is how it can line up the design and cut lines. And….. Success!!! I see a few things are a bit off such as the Toscana Vigneto circle is not quite centered and the coffee stamps are a tad off….. but, all the others cut exactly how they showed on my screen.

Now, what I would suggest is practice. Is every one going to turn out perfect? No, probably not. But, with practice you will get the hang of what works and what does not.

Check out the “Let’s Explore v4” series HERE or at the top of the blog.

Check out my Silhouette Instructions and Events tab for more information on Personalized Silhouette Instruction.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Posted on February 27, 2018April 26, 2023 by silhouettesecretsplus — 22 Comments

Let’s Explore v4 – Magnet Trace

We are finishing up the Trace panel today by exploring the options of Magnet Trace. The Magnet trace is a feature that is unlocked when you have the Designer Edition upgrade to the software.

You will find this feature on the 3rd tab of the Tracing Panel, that is found on the right side of v4.

While there are not many options on this Panel, it still has so much potential. Let’s take a look.

Magnet Trace – Select your object to trace & then “Magnet Trace” is available. Click on it and you will get a red circle with a red dot in it. This is your trace tool.
Size – Change the size of your Magnet Trace tool by using the slider bar, the arrow up or down keys or highlighting the numbers and typing new numbers in.
Trace – After your Magnet trace is complete, click here to create your cut lines. You can see the red cut lines around my flower below. Note: this photo is on the Send tab, to get the bold red cut lines to show up.
Trace & Detach – Choose this option if you want your design to be detached from the background. This works great if you are wanting to do a Print and Cut project with your design.

This is a really neat feature and it took me a bit to think of what I would do with it. You can see that the edges of my design are not perfect and I would do some clean up on this image. So let’s do a little bit of point editing to clean it up.

First, check out these edit points, double click on the image to bring up the Point Editing window. All those little dots, those are edit points. Now, edit points can be intimidating but they can also be fun to play with. If we were to cut this as it is, it will sound funny as it cuts because the Silhouette machine has to hit every single one of those edit points when it cuts.

Let’s zoom in and check out the edges.

As you can see there are some edges that can be cleaned up.

You are able to move and delete edit points to your desired effect. I can say that this cleanup took only a few minutes. The more you play with the edit points, the better you will understand what they do. Just by moving the edit points in towards the flower, I eliminated the excess background that the trace grabbed.

You can select multiple edit points by holding down the Shift key and dragging your mouse over the ones you want to highlight and then you can move them all at once or delete them all at once.

What a difference a little edit point clean up makes.

Now here are all the edit points after I’ve cleaned it up. Since this is a flower with lots of curves, it will still have many edit points so you can keep the realistic look of the flower.

But, it has a lot less than the original trace.

Now, I’m sure as you read this you have asked yourself, what would you do with this? I’ll be honest, I did the same when I started looking into it because I have never played with this before. And now ideas are hitting me about all the possibilities.

If you do not have Photoshop or access to photo editing software, you can use the Silhouette software and this is one way to grab something from a photo.

Or you could use your own photos that you’ve taken and make Print and Cut stickers. These are photos of flowers I took at a friend’s poolside last summer. I think they would make gorgeous stickers that you could add to your planner or calendar to enjoy everyday.

To learn more on how to set up a Print and Cut check out the Page Setup Panel – Registration Marks post.

You can find all of the Let’s Explore v4 post HERE.

I hope you enjoyed exploring the Magnet Trace feature in the Silhouette Studio v4 software. This program is amazing and I learn new things every day!

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Posted on January 23, 2018April 26, 2023 by silhouettesecretsplus — 47 Comments

Let’s Explore v4 – Fill Color Panel

Today we are going to explore the Fill Color Panel located on the right side of Silhouette Studio v4.

I use this feature a lot when I design in the Silhouette software for many reasons. Now, understand that by filling a design with color, it does not cut in that color. The color you fill it with will be a visual reference only, unless you are making a Print and Cut project. If you are creating a Print and Cut project, then the colors will be a representation of what colors will print on your printer.

I fill my designs and fonts with color so I can visualize the design better. Typically, I just fill it with black, but if I’m creating a multi-color image, I can then choose the colors that will best match my design. Another reason to fill it with color is to be able to select the design or font easier. When an image is transparent, you have to click on the red outline of the image to select it, which can sometimes be difficult. However, if you fill it with a color, you can click anywhere on that color to select the object.

For today’s example, I am using a font from the new SoFontsy site called Wine Not and will be creating my own design.

You can see in my photo above that when I use the Text tool and type in my font, that it comes in transparent. Also, notice that the font name has a few extra letters in front of it, this is the Designer’s signature and something to keep in mind when you download fonts. You may need to pay close attention to the full font name to find it in your Text Style list.

Something else to point out here is the extra space around the font, as you can see my text selection box is 2.218″ in height but if you look at the grid spaces, the font is really less than 2″ in height. Check out this guest post I wrote at the Silhouette School blog on Forcing Accurate Text Sizes for more information on that.

So, how do you fill something with color? First, make sure your object is selected. You will see the selection box around it when it is selected. Then, you can click on the Fill Color Panel on the right side of your Silhouette software or it can also be found in the top left corner of the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar).

Now let’s Explore the Fill Color Panel.

Color Palette Selection – In this area click on one of the blocks of color and the design selected will change to that color.
Eyedropper color selection – Click on this and then click on another color on your design mat to pick up that color and use it.
Color Selection – This is the color that is currently chosen as the Fill color with the Eyedropper tool.
Transparency – This changes the transparency of the Fill color chosen. In the above photo, the design at the top has my website placed over the top as you would place a watermark and the Transparency is decreased to 71% versus the design on the bottom that is still at 100%.
Advanced Options – Opens up a panel where you can move the color selection around manually or under the color graph you can input the specific numbers for a certain color that you would like.
Fill Gradient – Here you have many options to change the color and the gradient fill and change the properties of how the design looks. You can also decrease the transparency of the gradient, adjust the color even more, and change the angle of the gradient.
Fill Pattern – Here there are many patterns for you choose from or you can add new patterns into the library and those will show up here. You also have the ability to change the Transparency of the pattern and under Advanced Options can choose to mirror, change the aspect ratio, rotate, change the angle, scale, and pan the pattern.

In the photos above, on the left, you can see I just clicked on the Fill Pattern option and chose a polka dot pattern, I did not change anything else. On the right, I changed the mirror, angle of the pattern, increased the scale, and panned the pattern so that it was a bit different.

As you can see, you have many options available when you are designing and using the Fill Color Panel. Keep in mind, that while you can change the color, gradient and pattern fills on the screen, the Cameo will still cut the color that you place on your mat. If you want the design to be how you have filled it on the screen, you need to look at creating a Print & Cut project. Check out more information here on last weeks exploration of Registration Marks for Print and Cut projects.

For our project today, I have used a font called Wine Not by Design Shark available on the new SoFontsy site. All the designs on the site come with a 100% Commercial Use license and are cuttable files.

And I’ve included the design used in the post as a freebie!

You can download this free Studio cut file HERE. Personal Use Only.

The graphics I used also came from the font file and I accessed them through the Glyphs Panel in my Silhouette Studio software. The Glyphs Panel is available in the Silhouette software for those who have the Designer Edition upgrade and higher than v4.1.197 of the Silhouette software. You can find great prices on the software upgrades at Swing Design if you need to purchase it. I highly recommend upgrading to at least the Designer Edition upgrade.

I hope you learned a bit about the Fill Color Panel and how useful it can be when you are creating in your Silhouette software.

Check out the entire “Let’s Explore v4” series HERE.

Check out my Silhouette Instructions and Events tab for more information on Personalized Silhouette Instruction.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

**This post may contain affiliate links. What that means is that I may receive compensation if you purchase through the links I have provided. The price you pay for the product or service is not higher but I may get compensated for sharing.

**This post may contain affiliate links. What that means is that I may receive compensation if you purchase through the links I have provided. The price you pay for the product or service is not higher but I may get compensated for sharing.

**This post may contain affiliate links. What that means is that I may receive compensation if you purchase through the links I have provided. The price you pay for the product or service is not higher but I may get compensated for sharing.

**This post may contain affiliate links. What that means is that I may receive compensation if you purchase through the links I have provided. The price you pay for the product or service is not higher but I may get compensated for sharing.

**This post may contain affiliate links. What that means is that I may receive compensation if you purchase through the links I have provided. The price you pay for the product