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Whats the best software for digitizing images for embroidery?

November 11th, 2012 2 comments

I have a Janome memorycraft 10000.

Why don’t you checkout the Janome digitizing program. I believe that it might have some nice features and you do have the Janome machine. Be careful with digitizng softwares that don’t output to your JEF format. If you get a software that doesn’t have JEF format, you will need to save the designs that you digitized in DST or PES format and then go to Janome Customizing and convert to JEF or SEW formats. Maybe you can see if your Janome dealer will let you try out their copy of Janome Digitizing to see what you think about it.

You can get other brands of digitizng software as long as you are aware that you will need to maybe output to DST or PES and then go into your Janome Customizer to convert to JEF, so that you can test the sewouts. The good brands off of the top of my head are (all over $1000-be careful of used versions, they use a security device called a dongle and without the dongle you wasted your money–the dongle might not work for the second user–so software must be new in the box with the dongle):
Janome Digitizer, Bernina Plus, Origins, Viking autodigitizing, Corel, Viking VP3, to name a few.

I have Bernina Plus 4 and I love it. I am under the impression that Janome Digitizer is just as good. On the bernina Plus, you have manual & auto digitizing functions. I prefer the manual but the auto feature is nice. The manual digitizing in bernina (& I suspect in janome) is object oriented (ie, you can cut & paste) and that is why I like it. Some other brands might have same features.

I have Viking autodigitizing and it is a better auto-digitizer than Bernina Plus’s auto digitizing engine. But Viking’s autodigitizing is much harder for the manual digitizing. I would choose the Bernina or Janome over it.
I have Viking VIP & it is very hard. Now, I don’t know if the new VP3 is better so I can’t really say.

I do beleive that Brother has a good rep but be sure that they support JEF files. Corel is new, so i can’t comment.

Note about autodigitizing softwares. You must have very clean clipart to use an autodigitizer. So, you must have a good graphics program to clean up clipart. If you buy clean clipart from Royalty free sources, then the auto is fine.

Next, are you going to go into biz? If so, you must have capabilities to do manual digitizing. There will be times that you will need to clean up your design or manually digitiize it. Customers think that manual digitizing is best. It all depends on complexity of design.

There are also home products that cost less, under $300 or so. Click N’Stitch needs clean clipart, you can’t manually digitize in it. Plus you can’t save to Native Format. The other one is Embird which has a 30 day trial. They have a plug in for manually digitizing. It is hard but a good value.

Again, I want to mention about the dongle, you need the dongle to run most of these progs. Don’t ever lose the dongle. Lost dongle==Lost Money. Comapnies will NOT replace dongles. Today the dongle is plugged in the USB port. If you BUY used software & there is NO dongle…YOU HAVE LOST YOUR MONEY..

Good luck. If I was getting a new embr machine i would look into the Janome & the janome Digitizer. Criswell, the famous designers of lace use Janome.