Digitizers draw shapes delineating areas or outlines that are filled or lined with a certain kind of stitching.
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This file is specific to the software they use and is not formatted in a way that embroidery machines can read. When a digitizer creates a design, the digitizing software saves their design in what’s called a condensed, native, or work file. As digitized, with thread colors and brand specified, this work file contains all the information used to create the initial file and can be edited.
In order to make a little more sense of why digitizers are stuck with the limitations of the files, let’s take a look at how they work and file types involved in getting your machine running. There are many reasons why the colors don’t come out the same as the sample picture, but the easiest explanation is that the files that some machines require have a limited set of embedded colors built into the specs of the file type or contain no thread color information at all. Why do the colors that show up in my software or on my machine never match the ones I see when I buy the design? Why do different file formats switch colors around or completely change them? Don’t digitizers just use the right colors?Īs a digitizer myself, this may sound defensive, but it’s somewhat out of the digitizer’s hands when it comes to outputting a machine embroidery design file with the ‘correct’ colors. It’s time for another edition of our seldom-seen advice column, Ask the Ghost in the Embroidery Machine! Today we have a home embroiderer with a bone to pick with palette-thrashing digitizers, but all is not what it seems…