Cutters read colour. Rollers read light.
Two tools, two languages — and once you speak them, any drawing becomes exactly the tool you meant. Here's the whole cheat-sheet on one page.
Rollers & Texture Plates
How your image becomes texture
Stands tallest on the roller — so it presses deepest.
Sits flat — the ground your pattern rises from.
Lighter = taller. One image, a whole range of heights.
Hue is ignored; equally-light colours press the same. Want a height per colour? Use Pattern Colours.
Brightness → height. Default range 0–2mm — and you set both ends yourself.
2mm is a starting point, not a ceiling. Under 0.5mm barely shows. Go deeper for bold, chunky patterns and thicker mediums — pottery and quilted pockets want 3mm+. It's only tall, thin features that turn fragile when you push the depth up.
Keep every line at least 0.5mm wide at final roller size. Hairlines soften away in printing, then again when you press.
A roller is a loop — the left edge meets the right. Build it seamless and the join disappears. Not seamless? You get a clean cut, not a smeared join.
Pick the one that matches your image.
Greyscale or line art, kept crisp. Brightness sets the height.
Solid, unshaded colours — each gets its own height. Drag to reorder.
Smooth tones go straight to height. Run photos through DepthPrep first.
One click flips raised ↔ recessed. Deboss or emboss, same artwork.
Cutters & Stamps
How your colours become cuts & imprints
A solid black area presses in as a flat, solid impression.
A solid red area becomes its own blade and cuts through — hanging holes, open centres.
The darker the grey, the deeper the imprint. One shape, many depths — see the depth chart.
On its own, white is empty space. But white on a black fill carves detail back in — lines inside a solid impression.
Grey = how deep it presses. The darker the grey, the deeper it goes.
Stick to these two greys — #404040 and #808080. Paler greys are a gamble: whether they register depends on how much black is elsewhere in the drawing, so the same pale grey can work in one design and vanish from another. If a grey area hasn't shown up in the preview, darken it a step and rebuild.
White all the way around it — that's how each depth stays its own step.
The outline is the cutter's shape — without it, the app sees loose shapes.
Matching Insert Cutters & Mirrored Pair.
Flip one toggle and every black pocket and red hole gets its own little cutter, printed beside the frame. Cut the inlays from a contrasting colour and they drop straight in.
Both orientations in the one print. A finished pair of earrings, not two separate jobs.
Every code on this page works today — upload a drawing and watch it happen.
Start Designing