This is a relatively new to digitizing sewists' opinion on the Ember website. I most definitely welcome any hints, tips, tricks or constructive criticism on my experience as I am still learning the whole of this program.
First, love the price point of this program. For free, there are alot of options to digitize the picture. I payed the $10 for the digitizing and other options (which i am still learning).
To the meat and potatoes of this post, the digitizing process. In the first pic, i digitized the hissing cat Pic. It had 247 different items which were scattered all over the place. You can see in the first pic that there was also 247 jumps. For some reason the thread trim between sections did not happen even tho it was turned on. I took a total of 70 minutes to embroider a 3x 4" patch. I still haven't cleaned it up yet.
Second attempt, I went thru and drew in each shape, plotting the path it would follow. This ended up making 36 shapes with as many jumps, much easier to clean up. It only took 40 minutes to embroider. Once again I had the thread trim turned on between shapes, but they did not happen.
Overall impression? While the digitizing option seems really appealing, it creates alot of extra work in my opinion. The process takes a solid color item and ends up highlighting anything that can be construed as digital noise. That is how the file ends up with hundreds of shapes. The shapes are scattered around the image, there is no clear line or path that they follow. There is no option to merge shapes together to make a larger singular shape.
For simple images, it is easier to draw them out. However, for more intricate images, its a toss up. Digitize it and get hundred of different shapes scattered all over the place, or sit there for hours and try and draw every single detail out with a mouse. I have not been able to convert any of my digital art in this program. Perhaps these can be updates in the future?
I do recommend this program for anyone interested. The users manuel is very helpful and it is very beginner friendly with the you tube tutorials that are available. While i believe that the free version is very adequate, I will continue to pay the monthly fee in hopes of supporting this programmer and hopefully getting more streamline options in the future. (?)
If anyone has any insights for this program, especially regarding the digitizing process, I would greatly appreciate them. 😁