Cleaning up an image

I am using my glowforge to engrave images on wood. Most of the time it is a military logo. I copy the image from Google images and place in in Inkscape. At this point the image is clear and nicely defined. From Inkscape I import it to my Glowforge. The image seems to pick up some small degree of blurriness with lots of tiny dots that are then engraved into the wood along with the image.
Is there anyway to clean and sharpen the image before I engrave it?

sounds like JPEG artifacts. I’d avoid jpegs as source files for drawings such as logos. Most military emblems may be found as SVG (vector) files with a little searching.

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Yes.

There are easier ways and harder ways. I would recommend learning to use a program like gimp, and getting to know the magic wand selection tool.

There is also a website that will remove backgrounds for you, but as I understand it, it is fairly low-res. You might wnat to give it a try for the meantime, it might do what you need.

It is linked here:

Take a look here for more reading:
https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=remove%20background

Don’t rule out using Inkscape vector trace too. It’s hard to know what to advise here because the path to take will depend on the art in question. If it’s a black/white logo, then sure, tracing can work really well. If it’s got shades of grey, you’re going to want to keep it as vector raster, and we’re back to removing the background by some means in a raster editor.

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I tried using a .PNG image and it worked really well. I will stay away from jpeg from now on. Thanks for your help

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