How to convert picture to SVG - 3 easy methods (Decals for Vinyl Crafts)

hello Cricut buddies, Jav here from Cricut Maker Crafts! today I'm showing you how to turn your photos into a decal to create personalized projects and gifts this was a very highly requested tutorial so I decided to create a separate video showing the three different methods that you can use to create your own decals so these three methods are using the rapid resize of free picture stencil maker the second one is using Cricut design space and the last one using a software called in scape so where I'm gonna show you how to turn your photos into decals using all these three methods in this video so let's get started now before we get started with today's tutorial I want to share a couple of announcements so first of all I'm running a milestone giveaway once I hit 10k subscribers on my youtube I'm gonna give away a Cricut maker bundle so if you want to win this make sure you hit the subscribe button below secondly I wanted to share this amazing video that I created for everyone just starting out with Cricut or don't know what SVG or SVG cut files are so go ahead and sign up for this completely free training video the link is given in the description below also if you are new to the Cricut world and finding it hard to remember all the tasks that you need to perform with your Cricut then go ahead and grab this set of cheat sheets that I created just for you it's only 15 dollars and you get this 40-page set of cheat sheets with all the diagrams and everything about everything that you need to do with your Creek kids so let me just read out some of this stuff that are included so there's the description on everything about design space the left hand side panel the right hand side panel how to cut how to mirror how to group how ungroup' everything is given in this set of cheat sheets that you just need to download you can you can print it out and keep it beside your cricut or you can just leave it on your device to refer to it whenever you feel like so when I was getting started this really helped me in remembering everything that I needed to remember about my Cricut so go ahead and grab this it's only $15 the link is given in the description down below so first of all I'm gonna go to pixabay.com to get a free image so this is my favorite website to get images for commercial and for personal use so I'm just gonna pick up any image just for the demonstration purposes from here and one thing to keep in mind when you're selecting a photo to turn into a decal is to make sure that the there is high contrast in the image it shouldn't all be in the light shade like all white colors that's gonna be really difficult it should have like a dark and light contrast so that you can easily turn it into a decal so I'm gonna go with this photo there is the groom's suit is kind of dark but the girl's dress is white so we'll probably not the best image but just let's just go with it and see how it looks like so I'm just gonna download this and save it on my computer next I'm gonna go to this website it's called so if you're just google rapid resizer free picture stencil maker you'll find the link for this website on the top so just click on it and you'll end up on this screen so as you can see from the photo over here you can change your photos from from a normal photo into a decal as you can see over here so I'm gonna show you a couple of different things that you can do with the photo there are a lot of options that you can play around with to get something that you like so just wait for the photo to load so this is the first one over here so wet with the edge selected this is what your photo is gonna look like and you can use these you can drag this icon over the bar towards the dark and the white side to change the effect as well you so as you can see when I changed when I brought it all the way to the left-hand side the entire photo became black in color so you can't see anything and roughly in a bit away from the edge this is what we get now let's see what happens when I select thin and this is what it looks like when you select threshold this is the phone this is the format that I recommend working with but it's totally up to you so this one will make the elements real nice and fake and easy to cut with and easy to cut out and once again you can use the scroll bar to make adjustments with this second bar you can modify the lines and either have them super sharp or soft in nature it's totally up to you so as you can see when I click on sharp their details become more prominent and when I take it towards soft it it just softens the look and the last one over here is adaptive and this is what you get when you select adaptive so you can play around with all of these four options and figure out what which effect you like the best and once you're done all you gotta do is so once so once you're happy just click on download or print on download or print on one page and just click on save on your computer and the image will now be saved on your computer which you can now go to design space and upload it and edit it further and I'm gonna show you how to modify and refine your image to turn into a decal because right now you can see we have all of these extra stuff behind the couple which you don't want so I'm gonna show you how to get rid of all these extra stuff in design space so let's open up design space and I'm just gonna click on new project and then I'm gonna click on upload next I'm gonna select the photos from my hard drive and upload it here so here we are and once you're on the screen just select simple and this is where you're gonna end up from here now we're gonna work on removing these extra stuff so first I'm just gonna use the wand and click on this white portion to get rid of it so we want a checkered background like this this means there is no background the white part is all gone so we just have the black stuff to cut on the vinyl and to get rid of these excess stuff on the side all you can do is just grab the eraser and start erasing every single thing that you don't want in the photo so once you're happy just click on can you and next save your photo as as a cut file and if you see all of these extra marks even after using the eraser tool you can always just click on back and go back and remove all these marks so let's open up this image in the canvas and let me show you another method of getting rid of all these extra marks so another thing that you can do is you can slice out all of these excess stuff so what you got to do is grab a rectangle or any other shape tool place it on top of your image select both the image and the rectangle and the shape or square or whatever you're using just select both of these and click on slice so after hitting slice you'll see all of these different layers so just click on each and delete every single one of them this is a great way to get rid of any unwanted stuff on your image all right now your image is ready to be cut now let me show you how to use design space to convert your photo into a decal so I'm just gonna upload the same image in design space I'm gonna select simple and click on continue next I'm gonna crop out the image so that I don't have a lot of excess stuff to work with just gonna simplify the process okay that looks much better and easier to work with now I'm gonna click on advanced option and I'm gonna reduce the number of colors to two and the color balance and the color balance to one so we just need to simplify everything over here and then you can just use your wand or your erase tool to get rid of all these excess stuff from the sides so the as you can see the results are not as good as the stencil maker website but for some reason the website is not working you can still use cricut design space to edit your photo now let's have a look at how you can use Inkscape to turn your photo into a decal so I'm gonna use a completely different image for this part so this is the image that I'll be using it's I got this one from pixabay as well and what I'm gonna do is and I'm using the free software in scape it's an illustration software that you can download from Inkscape dot org and it works both it works for both Mac as well as Windows so you can go ahead and grab this offer open up the software and then just drag your photo to the canvas so once your photo is inside the sulfur just click on Pat and click on trace bitmap so you should see this new window pop up and over here just click on live preview at the bottom right up to the new tab so they can see what's going on and again over here you have a couple of different options just like the ones shown in on the website so you can either go for brightness cutoff or you can go for edge detection and you can use these toggle options and the right-hand side to at just the level of brightness cutoff or edge detection that you want if you're not happy after with the results after uploading them on design space cos sometimes the pictures might look a bit different on design space if you're not happy you can always come back and I did the picture once again it's gonna take a couple of tries but you'll at least get something that you really want so once you're done just click on OK and your decal will appear on top of your image so you've got to delete the background image to view the decal so here's our decal and that's our original image so I'm just gonna delete the original image and I'm just gonna go to file and save as SVG and now this image is ready to be uploaded on design space to cut with your Cricut and this is another image that I made this is the one that I used for my balsa wood project and you can check out that project in description down below so I used the Inkscape software to convert this image into a decal and it turned out so good as you can see over here it took me a couple of tries to get exactly what I wanted but the end result was pretty good so yep that's it those were the three different methods of changing your images into decals alright with that we have reached the end of today's tutorial hope you girl and guys enjoyed it if you have any questions feel free to drop them in the comment section down below and do not forget to subscribe to my channel for a chance to win a Cricut maker bundle when I hit 10k I'll ask you in the next video bye bye

Channel: Cut N Make Crafts

Views: 22,640

Rating: 4.6748767 out of 5

Keywords: cricut projects, beginner cricut projects, cricut maker, diy, cricut

Id: _5i2bK14p58

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020