Acrylic Photo Engraving


Okay. I assume this won’t do much good? There’s not much detail with the hair on her body. This is the original picture

Simply not a suitable subject, as stated earlier.

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a beige dog on a beige background is bad. you need contrast. and, with a light colored dog like that without a ton of contrast in the fur, you’ll want as crisp a photo as possible to start with.

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@eflyguy and @shop , thank you. I wanted to make memorial ornaments for her and our other dog, both are beige, a yellow lab and a goldendoodle, but all of our photos are with them on our beige carpet. Any ideas of what I could maybe engrave or do to make something halfway decent of them with their photos for an ornament besides sublimation, which I don’t have a printer for…yet.

Nothing here. I have friends and family with light colored dogs (and also all-black) and they simply don’t make suitable subjects. Sorry.

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Your best bet would be to create a hand-traced outline, along the lines of what they did here:

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Hand tracing is the way for sure! Here’s a trace I did of my white dog by hand:

Original photo:

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That turned out beautiful! I don’t know how to hand trace. Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to do that in Inkscape?

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Looks great! Thank you so much for sharing! Making a memorial ornament for my two dogs have been high priority for quite some time since I purchased my Glowforge because our goldendoodle was sooo smart, she always knew when it was Christmas Day and was so excited to get her stocking that had been hanging with our kids’stockings…and our yellow lab definitely followed her lead and always knew something special was waiting by watching her queues!!! Miss them so much!!!

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Here’s a copy that might yield you a little better outcome if you want to try it. I adjusted with curves and levels trying to get some better white/black/gray. As said before, use covert to dots…
dog 12.7.22.pdf (8.1 MB)

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Thank you sooo much! I will give it a try, convert to dots and let you know! I won’t have time to try it tonight, but will definitely give it a shot by this weekend and let you know! You have no idea how much I appreciate it! Pulling out their photos and being this time of year really has brought back so many memories and has made me so emotional! I dearly love all of my animals, but you know that one very special one? That was Snickers, the goldendoodle! And Rowdy, our huge yellow lab, was just as much of a sweetheart and gentle giant, so goofy! She was the type of dog that was just happy as long as you had a hand on her to pet her! We lost them both in the same year. :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

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I’ll add mine to it too. I’ve never really gotten the hang of engraving in acrylic, so this probably won’t be super useful, but it’s something to play around with.

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For the light puppies, I would honestly suggest something like this:

(this is @geek2nurse’s daughter which is how I knew about it)

I got one from her of my cat and her turnaround was very fast, and the portrait is gorgeous - and because it’s a line drawing it can engrave beautifully.

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Awww, thank you too sooo much!!! :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: I will give both of them a shot this evening and see how they do! So appreciated!

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I seriously don’t know why I didn’t think about that, but my daughter is a graphic designer and has done pet portraits for clients just like this too! She just had a baby recently and is taking a break from work, but might check into that. Thank you!

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I recommend hiring someone on Fiverr.com to draw your dog into a black and white vector art.

something like these.

Hope this helps.

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or into an SVG file

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Thank you for the suggested line art artists! Much appreciated! :grinning: Going to see how @rvogt and @CMadok’s edits to my original photo will engrave and then see if I need to do the line art option.

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@rvogt and @CMadok here are both of your enhanced photos engraved using the GUI presets for medium acrylic engrave with converted dots. I have each video named with your handle so you know which one is yours. They both turned out really nice in my opinion to a certain extent, but maybe I’m just expecting acrylic to look different in my head. You will see when the acrylic is held against the backdrop of my white desk in the background and under the right lighting, you can see Snicks, my dog, beautifully, but as soon as I draw the piece upward away from the white background or draw it in closer, it all becomes like a photo negative image. I was hoping the Christmas lights on my tree would make it show up like it does with my desk’s white background, but it is the negative blob look. Maybe a photo engraved piece of acrylic isn’t really the best medium to use for a Christmas ornament? I know you said it’s just not a good photo to begin with, but is it even possible to get a photo image that shows up well against the dark green and Christmas lights of a tree? Just thinking about it, I don’t know that I’ve seen any examples of actual photo engraved acrylic ornaments where it’s photographed actually hanging on a lit Christmas tree before. Either way, I want to thank you both soooo much for tweaking the photo! I’ve said it before, people on this group have always amazed me at how willing they are to help out and give advice and assist when someone is kind of at a loss of what to try! :heart:


EDIT: I thought the videos would show the what I named the files. The first video is @rvogt’s and the second one is @CMadok’s

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maybe trying inverting the image? I haven’t attempted to engrave an image in acrylic in a couple of years. Maybe try this one out?

This is just a quick invert, no tweaking.

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