Hello my friends! We are into 2026, and I have been remiss in adding any of the videos I have made in the past few years. While I get my act in gear and try to get those released, I decided to try to edit and upload and post more quickly. Sorry in advance- there probably will be more mistakes, less times spent on editing and re-writing captions, and writing long blog posts. To that end, this post will be a catch all for some work I am doing with Siser Juliet and the Siser Leonardo Design Studio (LDS). I start out with just LDS, but quickly morph into using it in conjunction with Photoshop. I have firmly landed in a place where using a combination of the two applications works best for me.
FYI- I may tweak this blog post occasionally if I have notes that I want to highlight that I feel might trip you up if you are trying to work through these experiments on your own. I think I will highlight them with TWEAK so if you’ve already read through this and came back to check on something, you can see new info more easily.
I am including an Intro video that describes this first series. I will also say that I am new to the Leonardo Design Studio and so there are a few things I miss as I go along- like the fact that there is Zoom and Pan capability in the Import for Print and Cut sequence. It is right at the top of the Import panel- DUH!! So I am learning the nuances as I go along. In general, I have been quite impressed with the flexibility of Leonardo Design Studio and I love how I can work with LDS and Photoshop in a variety of ways to do Print and Cuts depending on the project.
That all being said, there still are glitches in LDS. So if you are struggling with something you are trying to do that seems right, or you’ve tried it before and it worked, then save your current work, exit LDS and restart the program.
The first Video is the Introduction where I talk about the idea I had for doing a Print and Cut on the Juliet and then how that morphed along the way. The next video is a single Print and Cut, but I had the idea about printing a second time with a laser over the inkjet print and then having that all be cut on the Juliet. I discuss my initial method of the double print in the third video. In that experiment, I get another idea of how to utilize Photoshop for the double print sequence and I explore that in the fourth video. Again, while experimenting with that idea I arrive at the the way I do this type of project now and show you that method in the fifth video. All of this is described in the following Intro video, so if you are advanced, you might be able to watch that and/or read my quick descriptions here and be well on your way.
The second video describes how I import images for a straight up Print and Cut. However, I then break the results of the import into pieces. From there I can recombine the parts I want to keep into individual layers or groups, discard the pieces I don’t need, and then move all of the pieces around to squeeze as many things as I can into a single Print and Cut file.
The third video walks through my attempt to use Leonardo Design Studio to do a Print and Cut, but with two printings- one to Inkjet and one to Laser. The laser printing are images that are outlines and I wish to print them in black laser so that I can use them in a foiling/laminator machine with heat-set foil and get a glittery or glossy foil accent. My Inkjet and laser printers utilize different margins, and I struggle (still) using print properties to get the laser print to exactly align when printing over the inkjet print. Within LDS in order to to do the double print, I had to use print properties to align. However, I end up with two sets of registration marks- one from the inkjet print and one from the laser. They do not exactly align and so the cuts can end up off if the Juliet gets confused when reading the marks.
In the fourth video instead of printing my prints for the Print and Cuts to my actual printers, I save them to PDFs. I bring those into Photoshop and can print from there. I bring the inkjet images and the layer images into their own layers in Photoshop. On the laser layer I remove the registration marks. Now I can print in inkjet with the registration marks, and I can then adjust the laser layer to match up with the inkjet prints by moving the laser image over .51 mm and down 1.97mm. NOTE: at the point of filming it might be other numbers- I’m still tweaking the offset numbers 😉. I then print the laser images on top of the inkjet printout. Now I end up with a single set of registration marks that will not confuse the Juliet. Once the images are printed, I can place that printout onto the mat, and since I already have the cut contours within LDS, I send the cuts and cut around the images printed from Photoshop. NOTE: I do not move the layers in Photoshop, other than to do the alignment for printing. I already have the cut contours set up in LDS, so I need to leave the images (especially the inkjet images) in the exact same place as when there were saved from LDS. If you need to move the inkjet images/both sets of images then watch the next video to see how to get the new cut contours set up in LDS.
TWEAK If you decide to utilize Photoshop for design and print, and then want to use LDS for cut contours, and you build a bounding box like I did in the video, then be sure to check that the box does not cover the registration marks at all. I forgot to mention that in the video 😉If you are doing print and cut in LDS, and the registration marks are clipped because of the bounding box you might have issues with the cuts. Or you can always try to remember to shut off the bounding box before you print the inkjet layer. I originally made the bounding box blue, and shut it off for print, but another time I set it to white and didn’t shut it off and ran into this issue.
When I removed the registration marks from the laser layer in video number 4, I saved it on its own layer and then to its own file. So in video number 5 I show how to take those registration marks and design and print starting in Photoshop. If I am doing a double print, I can still print only a single set of registration marks, which again works better for the Juliet. When I am finished with the design and prints from Photoshop, I save the images that will provide the correct cut contours from within Leonardo Design Studio. If you are following along, typically this will be the inkjet layer. I turn off the registration marks and then save images to a jpg or png. You can remove the marks during the import process, but it is one less step if you shut them off before saving the images to the jpg/png file. The last step here is to go into LDS, import the inkjet images you just saved, bringing them in as print and cuts. This is only to get the cut contours for what you just printed from Photoshop. Now when you click the Send Design button, you can ignore the print button and just utilize the Cut panel button to have Juliet read the registration marks and perform the cut around your images.
The last video I am including here, was another idea I had while doing another Print and Cut project. In this case, I had prints and an image that represented a cut that I wanted to use on the prints, all within Photoshop. It was a tag shape that I like to use all the time. Instead of making the prints the same shape as the tag within Photoshop, I leave the prints as rectangles that are slightly larger than the tag shape. Then I can utilize the prints within digital cutting scenarios, or I can use them with manual die cut machines, like the Accucut. I exported the prints and the tag shape and import them into Leonardo Design Studio. As usual, I break the import layer into the individual pieces. I get rid of the cuts around the prints, and I get rid of the print that came in with the tag shape. Now I can combine the tag cut contour shape with the prints to do the print and cuts from LDS. I also talk about tweaking the cut shape and then also I talk about a snafu I ran into with LDS. Nothing I tried seemed to work, until I exited LDS and got back in. That has happed a few times to me so far!
Hopefully you learned something from these video! Thanks for visiting!
