- Uploading Raster Images (.jpg or .png)

Select the “Upload” icon in the toolbar on the left of the screen. Then drag your image file into the specified area inside Design Space.

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Raster Images are created by pixels and not vector math.

Because of this, we need to specially prepare our images for the Cricut to understand what lines to follow.

Simple, high-contrast, raster images are the best and easiest kind of raster images to work with, simply because it makes the 'vector conversion' process much simpler for Cricut Design Space. It can easily recognize what shape you would like to create because of the extreme contrast between the leaf and the surrounding white/transparent background.

 

To demonstrate the full extent of the image editing tools that Design Space provides, I will be demonstrating the 'vector conversion' process with a low-contrast image leaf :

 

When uploading a raster image, you will be met with the following screen. This is where you specify to Design Space what quality level your image is.

 

As you select quality types, the image will update the colors to show how the software will compress the image to prepare for cutting.

I will be choosing 'Complex' as my image quality type. Below is the next screen that will show up.

From here, you can edit the image you uploaded! To start, I'm going to use the crop tool to crop out the extra background. To do this select the 'Crop' option and then with your mouse, select the portion of the image that you want to crop. I'm focusing on the leaf itself.

 

From here, you can focus on background removal with the provided tools.

 

Select

The select tool will erase similarly colored portions of the image as you click on them. In this example, I only clicked the background area once and the select tool removed all of the dark green areas.

Erase

The erase tool allows you to manually erase parts of your image with your mouse.

Restore

The restore tool allows you manually restore parts of your image with your mouse.

Once you're done, click the Apply and Continue button. From there, you will be taken to the 'Select Upload Type' screen. In this case, I don't need to worry about Print then Cut because the Cricut Maker does not have a printing option. So just select 'Cut Image' and then 'Upload' using the button in the bottom right corner.

 

Add your image to Canvas by clicking the green button on the bottom left!