Silhouette Tips and Tricks

Hello my friends! I am going to write this post with the idea that I will keep adding to it when I come across a cool idea or tip or trick when working with the Silhouette Curio.

I’ve already written some posts on the paper I like to use for cutting intricate designs for stencils, masks and cutout. You can find them here and here. Today, while doing another project, I came up with some workarounds and I was going to email them to myself so I wouldn’t forget (haha the things you have to do when you are older). Then I thought they might be helpful to others and so decided to document them here. Hope it helps!

Enjoy!

• I was doing a print and cut, and it worked the first time, but after that the Curio was unable to detect the registration marks. This had happened in the past and I wasn’t able to figure out a reliable workaround. I finally tried going into the Page Setup panel and turning off the registration marks and turning them back on, and that seemed to work. Give it a shot if you are running into this too!
• New Update on Print and Cut (1/30/2021)- THIS IS CRITICAL! I keep getting bit by this 🙁 . Make sure the line on the cutting mat on the left or top side (near the first registration mark) is covered by the page you are cutting. If that line is showing it can cause the registration to get confused and the machine just keeps trying to follow the line down and it never gets to the first registration mark.
• Another Update on Print and Cut not working (10/26/2020)- glossy marks may be the problem. In my case it was using laser printing (See this post silhouette-curio-not-recognizing-registration-marks )
• I may just do print and cuts more often now. I like the fact that on the second (or 3rd or 4th…) time, cutting is dead on accurate. Sometimes my curio goes off the mark if I have to cut again, even though it is supposed to line up the same way each time you load the mat. My curio has never done that reliably. So, especially if I am working on trying to figure out settings for new paper, I will do a print and cut and just print out a tiny circle or something in some of the dead space. Then I can use the registration marks for cutting and re-cutting in exactly the same place. I am wondering if this would work on the cameo if it has the registration mark capability too? Now, the registration marks do take up some real estate on the mat, so if you are trying to maximize your cutting area and you know your cut settings are perfect, then you won’t need this tip.
• If you are using Epson Premium Presentation Matte paper for print and cut, I used the premium blade and set the cut settings to:
  Speed:4
  Force: 21
  Cut: 2
• Just recently I was using print and cut on an image that I had removed out of a card background in Paintshop Pro. I printed just that element but my cut lines were off by a hair and so I had a sliver of a white edge around the cut out. In addition to the cutout, I had the whole card background in the same Silhouette Studio file so that I could print the backgrounds as well and the size and coloring would be the same. I was afraid they might potentially be off if I printed the backgrounds in PaintShop Pro and the cutouts in Silhouette Studio. So I was trying to figure out a way to align the cut lines with the backgrounds and have some of the background bleeding out from the cut lines without going back to PaintShop Pro and doing it there. I gave the eraser a whirl and voila! It worked!! So I made a copy of the background, layered the cut lines over the element I wanted to cut out, and used the eraser to erase the background close to the cut lines, but leaving some cushion. This way, I wasn’t going to waste ink printing out the whole background for just the element. Here is what it looked like:

  

• Oh- and the eraser worked great on that screenshot above :). I didn’t have to get out of Silhouette Studio and into Photoshop or PaintShop Pro to edit that!
• Update on cutting out white space around a raster image (01/14/2022) You can use the slice tool to slice around the image and remove what you don’t want including white space. This is great for cramming in more items on the smaller space you have to fit things for print and cut!
• If you are printing and your image looks drab, make sure your are using the correct paper choice in printer preferences. And choose quality over speed! For Epson I chose the matching Premium Presentation Matte and color control. Color control for my system needs to be set to “Epson Standard (sRGB)”. If it is set to “No Color Adjustment”, the print looks drab. Also make sure your paper size is set up to match the size of the paper you want to print and cut. Generally this will be 8.5×11, but depending on your printer/paper it could be 9×12, or other sizes…

• More to come…