One of the problems that you have when you are looking at do a mural is typically the photo that you are working with is to small to work with. This was the case when I has creating this mural. For example the photo I was able to retrieve off the Internet was approx. 1.5 inches by 2.5 inches and had a resolution of 300 DPI. Now this is not going to be a big article when it comes to talking about resolution and DPI versus PPI but we will need to spend some time talking about what is the proper PPI to have with a photo. Note: when we look at a photo and we look at its resolution although it is expressed in DPI it really should be expressed in PPI. (which is pixels per inch) DPI is for printing only. As I have already mentioned the original image is 1.5 by 2.5 at 300 DPI. If we take a look at the this granite mural you will see that is 24 inches wide and 36 inches high. If i just resized the original image to this size it would never even come close to engraving properly. For this reason we need to get the photo up to a higher PPI so that we can print it properly. What I am shooting for here is a photo that is 24 by 36 and a PPI of 300. Although I do not have to have it at 300 PPI because I am making it so big if I leave it at 100 it will not process properly when I run it though the unsharp mask and conversion to black and white. Fo this reason I created a photo that had a resolution of 300 PPI at 24 by 36.
Typically when it comes to testing materials I have two methods. One involves creating a black box in Corel and just engraving the image. The second involves an actual test file that uses the colour mapping in your laser driver. Typically on most material such as plastic or wood I can adjust my power or speed on my machine as the material is engraving. Adjusting my power while the machine is running allows me to see my results as the machine is working. This makes it easy for me to quickly get the proper power and speed. However on product that uses Thermark / Cermark. I can not see the results of the mark until I clean off the spray. This makes using the black box not very good for this application. … Continue Reading
One of the things that I preach to those that run laser machines is that dirt is your enemy. A dirty machine is susceptible to many issues. These can include a clogged drive which can create slippage in the pulley and cause jagged letters, reduced power due to dirty mirrors or lens, or a dirty rail which can impede bearing life. Laser machines use very high end parts. For example the lens and mirror systems are of very good quality – quality of high end camera optics. Dirt on these parts can greatly reduce the quality and speed of your output on your laser. And because these parts are high quality they are expensive to replace.
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One of the more popular items to put photos onto is wood or granite. The problem is that wood is really not the greatest medium to work on. For this reason we really need to give ourselves the best opportunity to get the photo right. One technique that should be done on a photo that is going onto wood is to have the background knocked out. In this article I will show you a photo that is lasered on wood with the background and one that has had the background taken out. … Continue Reading
This help file takes you through how to create a photo in CorelDraw using both error diffusion conversion (Jarvis, Floyd Steinberg or Stucki conversion method) or the halftone conversion. I have done this to show you that you can experiment with different conversion methods on photos if you want to see if you can get a different look. Also one expensive software conversion program you can buy uses the halftone method of converting images. The image is than lasered on steel using Thermark. … Continue Reading
One of the more popular questions I get asked is what file format should i ask for when someone wants to send me an image. If it is a photo than the standard answer should be the raw format. If all else fails which it normally will than the next best thing is a tiff file (and I do not mean a jpeg saved as a tiff ) or more typical if there is no tif a JPEG.
However what about a logo say from a company. Typically what you get is a jpeg from the internet and we know how bad that can be. But all kidding aside if you are lucky to get an image what should you ask for. The best answer for a logo that is not a photo is a vector formatted file. Typically that comes to you in an EPS format or an AI format. However because the laser can laser bitmap or raster images than you can also have the image come to you as a JPEG or a PNG file. Typically they are in a black and white format … Continue Reading
I had a customer who bought a laser to create a number of scroll saw patterns on their laser machine. The problem is the images are in a book. This article will show you how to take the scanned image and vector it so that we can cut it out with our laser
Here is the presentation done in PowerPoint
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