Hello I’m new to GF and I wasn’t quite sure where to post this question, if its the wrong section in advance I apologize. I’ve engraved a cutting board before(thank you for the help) my cousin saw it and it gave her the idea to want an engraved cutting board for her husband. It’s his birthday and she wants to give it to him at a gift with his grandmother’s recipe to his favorite cake(Red Velvet). It’s an old handwritten recipe. Do I engrave or trace? I did search this and came across the gentleman who did his mom’s old recipe. However it was clear exactly what he did. Here’s a picture. HELP!
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Hi, and welcome to the forum 
For the future Problems & Support is for asking the company for help - everything else, goes into Everything Else
So, if you’ve read the other posts about doing this you’ll know it’s not easy. You’re going to need a graphics program (I use getpaint.net, but any raster editing program will work.) To remove the paper, and try to pop up the text you’ll need to mess with brightness/contrast, and colour.
Give me a few and I’ll get you started
Once you have good art it’ll be an engrave - it’ll take a while to engrave over so much area so be prepared!
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Thank you. I use Affinity Photo to edit photos and right now I’m in the process of doing that. I’ve sharpened the clarity, bringing up the resolution. I figure from previous comments about this I’ll need to make the photo black and white.
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Hello,
I tried cleaning up the image a little for you. I’m not confident that this image can be turned into an image that would engrave cleanly. Is it possible that the sender could take another photo with more light on it?
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Thank you soooo very much. V3 looks better to me too. I’ll tweak some things and post final project. Thanks again, this is time consuming not as easy as one things. Maybe I should say as I thought it would be.
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Yeah, human eyes see what we want to see - computers are not so considerate 
Looking forward to seeing your final work!
So it isn’t easy as you say, but maybe it is worth the effort.
Another idea for those of us that think part of the charm of a handwritten recipe is the food stains, smudges and other flaws of the actual handwritten document is a personalized frame to house the actual document. You could engrave a segment of the actual handwriting into the frame.
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This is something I really want to learn to do. Does anyone know of a good tutorial for it?
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I have made this suggestion before, have the recipe name in original writing
and then do the rest of the recipe in a ‘handwritten’ font
so its still a tribute to the author and easier to read.
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I don’t know of a video one, but honestly it’s WAY more art than technique. Open the photo in your raster program and mess with brightness, contrast, colours, and use the selection tools, the eraser, and the Undo/Redo buttons a lot! Keep working until you’re happy.
I cut the image to the area I’m focused on first
Then use brightness/contrast to get nice dark print and as close to white background as possible
Create multiple layers if the boldness of the print significantly changes in different spots on the image as it did on this one
Once you have the areas of the layers looking good, delete the parts that you don’t need and merge all the layers
Then use the selection tool with a hard edge to try and get as much large swaths of remaining colour (select/delete, then fill with white)
Then go pixel by pixel fixing any unreadable letters, or areas you’re not happy with (this is the part I didn’t do above because it’s what takes the time!)
Others have different methods, but that’s mine
People adore these engraved images, especially if the recipe is good and usable. It’s a good skill to have in your back pocket because you will run across folks asking if you can do these 
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It’s not the recipe that matters. It’s Grandma’s (or mom’s) recipe card that’s important. There are 100 recipes for red velvet cake or brownies or apple pie. It’s all about the recipe card and the tangible link of her handwriting.
If it’s just the recipe, you might as well use Arial.
What’s the impact of the Declaration of Independence on parchment in a replica of the original handwriting vs the version printed in Times New Roman in a textbook? There’s a reason all the gift shops sell replicas and not typewritten copies.
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what about a hybrid, the hand written recipe in the background and a sharp text in the foreground
Thanks for everyone’s input. I felt I had to keep the character and integrity of the recipe, that’s more important. My cousin-in-law was very close to his grandma. Here’s the finished product before cleaning up char marks. Once again thank you, the GF community is awesome. It takes the sting out the price of my pro. I love it.
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The best of ALL worlds!!! (clapping)
Absolutely
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Great job saving and reproducing the original and printing an easy-to-read version. This is the best of all options.
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Great solution!
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It’s perfect! I’m sure it will be forever treasured.
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