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Techno-Talk

Margaret Roberts

Artista V3 upgrade

The latest version of the Bernina Software will create designs for any embroidery machine. As with every upgrade, one wonders if it is worth the investment, but Version 3 seems to be well worth the money. There are 4 levels, Editor, replacing Customizer, Auto-Designer, new and aimed at people who mainly want to edit and customize, but occasionally want to do some simple digitising. The Designer level comes with all the features of the first two, plus the manual digitizing tools. The last is called Designer Plus and is the full package including the Photo-Snap and Cross-Stitch options. This review is of the Designer upgrade only.

Version 3 follows on very naturally from version2 and is very straightforward to use. The manual is much easier to read than the previous one. There are now over 220 ready-to-stitch designs and samples. The Outline and Fill choice is much wider, from outline stitch types to step and fancy fills. Lettering has also improved, there is a wide choice of interesting alphabets, with the ability to convert most True Type alphabets on your computer.

Then there is the facility of scanning in a fabric you have created for the background and adding it to the Fabric Display files. This can then be used whilst you are creating your new design that will eventually be stitched onto it. Both background and design can be seen on-screen together in Artistic Mode, almost exactly as it is going to look when actually stitched. It can be saved with your design and displayed each time you open the design. Those of you who do not intend to upgrade at this time, don't despair, as this is also possible in Version 2.

An image can be Edited using a linked Paint program such as Paint, Photopaint or Paint Shop Pro from within the Designer program. But the software itself can also prepare images for digitising, by reducing colours to an amount specified by you and eliminating blocks of less than 1 mm square. There is a choice of preparing a non-outlined image or an outlined one. It can then be Auto-digitised or manually digitised.

Here are more additions to the program.

• The Magic Wand is greatly improved and will now create objects with holes where needed, rather than fill all as before.
   
• Textured Edges can be created on either side of an image or on both sides. This has very useful creative possibilities.
   
• Colour Film is a new way of editing colours. Colours can be moved, deleted, pasted and ordered, on screen.
   
• You can add your own thread charts and save them as a Template. You can even mix your own colour of thread. But as there are already 26 Thread Charts included I should not think this necessary.
   
• The Bernina Artista Portfolio is now a very useful management program and designs can be downloaded straight to the machine or card reader.

Full marks to Bernina for including an option to save to a 'magic box', a device which allows other manufacturers' cards to be used. However, this remains untested.

I have only scratched the surface of this new version of Bernina Artista software, but I would be happy to recommend it.

This article is from The World of Embroidery, Volume 52 No.4, © Margaret Roberts.