Hello. I have tried to combine a photo with a Celtic circle. My questions are as follows.
Will the glowforge etch exactly as the file printed out? I.e with the white square around the dogs head breaking the circle or will it ignore square and only etch the complete circle along with the dog?
If it will print the circle broken by the white square how do I get round it? I have searched but Iam not entirely sure what the right terms are to use in the search.
I have tried putting one item to the back or front but that seems to make it disappear entirely, as always any help appreciated.
What I would do is combine them in your editing software (with the photo behind the frame so it looks the way you want it to) and then rasterize the whole thing. That’s the best way to get the outcome you want.
Oh, okay, I thought the frame might be a vector. You’ll have to either cut out the dog or cut out the circle, then. Clipping paths work well for that. Get it looking how you want and then rasterize the whole thing to get rid of the clipping paths, because GF doesn’t recognize them.
I’d have to experiment but this is doable. First, save your dog as a PNG if it is not already. then convert the white background to invisible. That looks like little blue hash marks in most photo editing programs. Now you should be able to place it without obscuring the outer ring.
As someone else said, do all your work in pre-production. Get to know Inkscape or AI well and you will soon be an expert on things like this.
PNG supports transparency and will typically save better as it’s a lossless file format. JPEG files will degrade as they are saved over and over. Or saving with low JPEG quality can introduce noise into the image. This really sucks when your pure white (which is ignored by the laser) turns into white mottled with gray dots (that are so close to white, it’s difficult to tell).
You could put them both in an editing software like gimp and “color to alpha” the white. It will remove the white from the file and make both photos transparent outside of where you want to etch. Or you could select around the dog and then put it in the circle.
D’OH! I had made the background transparent the first time but because I saved the file as a JPEG the background is filled with white. My problems started from that. Thanks for putting me right with the .PNG format.
