Cutting Out Pictures

I am trying to take color pictures, paste them on wood and cut out a cutline that I made in Inkscape to border just the people in the picture. When I try the cut its seems almost impossible to line the cut up with the picture using the glowforge camera. Any suggestions?
Thanks.

Neat concept. Yeah, for most people just the camera won’t do this. If you have snapmarks, (look for a magnet icon at the top of your GFUI) search them here and learn to use them. If the icon is not there you don’t have them and can’t control when you will get them. Not all is lost though. Search alignment and there are a lot of solutions making jigs.

here is a great place to start: Glowforge Interface - How to Get Perfect Alignment (Yes, perfect!) 🤔

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Welcome to the community! You are in the right place for help. The people here are by far the best accessory for your new laser. :sunglasses:

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Welcome. I agree that reading what markevans36301 suggested is your best bet at first. I also suggest starting alignment efforts with something a little simpler than complex outlines from photos. Try lining up geometric designs made in Inkscape until you are more familiar with how your particular machine is calibrated. You will have the most success when you are absolutely precise in measuring the thickness of your material and placing it as close as possible to the area directly under the camera.

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What you’re describing is called a “Print and Cut” file in the digital cutter world, and it’s a lot harder to pull off with a laser, since there is nothing that ties the laser movement to the inkjet printed image on the paper.

Except…for Snapmarks. Snapmarks can be used as a point of reference that ties everything together. If your machine has been chosen to be on the Snapmarks beta test, you will have a little magnet icon on the top row of the GFUI (like @markevans36301 mentioned above.) There are some notes for using them to create Print and Cut files here:

If not, you can still improve your alignment through using a couple of different techniques to compensate for the fisheye effect of the lid camera…@cynd11 wrote up a popular one here:

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Can you post an example of what you’re trying to do? I do pretty much this everyday, without snapmarks, but an example of exactly what you’re looking to do would help (cut shape, etc.)

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Thanks for the answers everyone. It looks like you do have Snapmark, so that would be a great option. You can find more information here: Introducing Snapmark (September 2018)

If you have any other questions, please post a new thread.

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