PNG to embroidery file
Turn a PNG into a stitch file your machine reads. What survives, what does not, and what it costs. Every stitch on screen before you pay.
What a PNG gives the machine
A PNG is a grid of pixels with an alpha channel, so the file itself knows where the logo stops and the background begins. That is the part that matters here: transparency becomes nothing at all, not white, so the garment shows through. The tracer reads the grid, finds the flat areas of colour and turns their edges into paths — which makes a PNG the best raster you can send.
What goes wrong with a PNG
- Anti-aliasing is the soft edge your program draws to make a curve look smooth. To a tracer it is a row of in-between colours, so a two-colour logo can arrive as nine. The workshop shows the thread count — turn it down, and the invented shades are the first to go.
- A screenshot is a PNG, and it is almost always too small. The workshop prints the source resolution under the mark: «Read at 240 points — that is all this 320 px file holds.» A bigger export gives finer lettering. Nothing else does.
- If the mark sits on a busy photograph, the engine says «Nothing to stitch was found. Is the image very pale, or is the logo on a busy background?» — it cannot tell the logo from the noise. Crop to the mark before you send it.
Do this first
Export at least 1000 px across, on a transparent or plain background, with no drop shadow and no glow. Those three things decide more than any setting in the workshop does.
Which file comes out
Pick the one your machine reads — DST, PES, JEF, VP3, EXP or XXX — or take the SVG, which is the drawing itself. The same stitches come out in all of them, so changing machine is a different download, not a new job.
What it costs
One file is $9, with no account. From $0.20 a file on a yearly plan. You see the whole mark, at the size you asked for, before you pay for anything.
- Can I convert a PNG to DST?
- Yes. Drop the PNG in the workshop, set the width in millimetres, and download the DST. The same mark also comes out as PES, JEF, VP3, EXP, XXX or SVG, at no extra cost.
- Does a transparent PNG stay transparent?
- Yes. Transparency becomes unstitched fabric, so the garment shows through where the PNG was empty. It is the main reason a PNG beats a JPG as a source.
- Why did my two-colour logo come out with nine threads?
- Anti-aliased edges. The soft pixels between the two colours are read as colours of their own. Lower the thread count in the workshop and they fall away first.
Nobody corrects the file afterwards. What is on screen is what the machine gets, and it is worked out in seconds.
Other files you can send
Measured in the workshop, not quoted from a brochure.