Scott:
You'll need digitizing software. Some of the most popular ones are:

PE Design
Origins
Generations
Embird Studio

They usually run several hundred $$ and there is a pretty steep learning curve. It is NOT as easy as scanning in a picture, converting the file and sewing it out. I've been practicing for about 3 years and still am less than overjoyed at my designs. If you only need a few designs done, it's easier, cheaper and quicker to hire someone to digitize it for you. Depending on the design, you can probably get someone to digitize it for you for $50 or so. Obviously if it's a huge or very detailed design, it would be more expensive. Frankly, there are so many sites to buy and/or download free designs that I don't do many of my own.

I agree there are sooooo many freebies out there plus emblibrary sales.Just trying to digitalize myself. With auto dig on my version 3 Artista softwear So much to learn Computer drives me crazy esp when I hit wrong key or mouse is so touchy on this laptop. LOL
Just wish I had emb sewing buddy in neighborhood

I Do all my art work using CorelDraw 12 & then PE-Design 5 I find that Coreldraw is the way to go, every thing in the software works as one So it,s EZ to ues.

BMP to PES Wow the frist thing is u must have art work thats 256 colors. next what ever it is, it has to be a Vector base artwork. if is not, your gonig to spend the hole day trying to trace pixels that are just to hard to trace. it can be done, but man your relly asking for a lot of hair pulling.

I have a cd with embroidery patterns on it. I need a pes format to open them. How or where do I get this in order to open my patterns. I was also told that I could purchase a cd reader that reconizes pes and would be able to connect my embroidery machine to it and the patterns would come up. Where do I get one of these and what brand? HELP!!!!!!

What embroidery machine do you have? To start, go to the site below and download a 30 day trial of this Embird software. Then, when we know what machine you have, we can help with the rest.

Here is a link that might be useful: my embroidery haven

hello all
I have been converting images now for years and i have got quite a few companies and peeps who send me their patterns for me to do, There are a lot of programs out their that promise the earth, but you really need to learn to use them or the finished result is rubbish, the quickest way at the moment is the corel drawings x3, once you get to grips with corel which does have a bmp to vector convertor just click on stitch and it sorts it all out for you, Well thats what it says....it does work but you do need to alter the stitch sequence because it does like to jump about a bit