Color Sorting

The “Happy Birthday” design has 6 unique colors but 13 color stops. To make it more efficient for sewing, you might like to optimize the sewing order to reduce extra color changes.

Because letters added together are considered one object, you can’t selectively rearrange them in the object tree. Fortunately, there is easier method accomplished via Color Sort, which can be accessed on the toolbar just to the right of the Undo and Redo buttons.

 

Clicking the Color Sort button displays the following dialog window:

Notice our design has been reduced by 5 colors.

 

Click ‘Save It…’ to save the color sorted file as a stitch file. If you don’t change the name, the program will append “_sorted” to the end of the current file name. Your original working file (.BE file) is preserved and not changed.

Color sorting can be useful in designs like this or designs that have poor sequencing. Color sorting in this program is intelligent, meaning it doesn’t indiscriminately combine all like colors together. It looks for layering and knows that some colors simply must be repeated.

 

Note: Do use caution when color sorting. Some designers have intentionally added extra color changes either for design flexibility or to optimize registration. For this reason, always Color Sort a copy of a design!