Engraving a JPEG

[dieterkutz]

Hello,

I am in the process of creating a “lapboard” for the Great Race. (www.greatrace.com) I wan tot engrave logos on the back. I have the logo from the race, but its in Full color. Can I just load the JPEG in the SVG file and print it while in color? Or do I need to change it to a Greyscale image or something else.

Thanks
Dieter

Holland Racing

[evansd2]

Generally you want to prepare the image by converting to greyscale and altering the contrast.

There are a lot of posts about that process here, let me see if I can pull a couple of them for you.

[evansd2]

Prepare photo for engraving tutorial

I’ve been struggling with engraving my photos on different materials. Fellow owners gave me suggestions and tip and today I finally got a good looking engraving. I thought I show the steps I did. Most likely some steps can be improved. Feel free to suggest improvements. I started with this photo I found online: [th_horses-2904536] Step 1: Desaturate: [image] Step 2: Adjust the curves: [image] I played with it until the tails are good and the background is as white as possible. Step 3: …

Tutorial - Preparing a Masked Image for Engraving

This tutorial is long overdue, but I promised a few people I would post it, so here goes. Im doing an engraving ive already done before so you can see some of the different options available when engraving something with a weird shape and an outlined cut. The outline part isnt necessary, but useful in a lot of situations, so this tutorial is a 2-fer. This is the image we are starting with. Im going to be bringing it into photoshop to clean up, and get some of the initial shapes to move into ve…

Preparing a Photo for Raster Engraving (NOT NECESSARY FOR GLOWFORGE)

@Dan has let us know that none of this mess is necessary to engrave photos on the glowforge, so I guess you can take a look at this and be thankful you dont have to go through all this trouble! awesome! As forum users are starting to get glowforges, I figured I might as well put up this tutorial for everyone to reference when preparing their photos for engraving. This will give a very similar result to what you would get using photograv. Ill just do one you guys have seen already, since I hav…

There are others, all I did was search for “preparing engrave”, like this:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=preparing%20engrave

[dieterkutz]

Thanks thats what I thought. When I actually get to use the GF more regularly I won’t need to ask dumb questions so much. I am rusty!

So this should work ok??

[evansd2]

One way to find out. Engraving is a pretty analog process, sometimes you just have to test it out and see.

Personally I might darken the car engrave a bit more using curves, but then I like a lot of contrast, and that may not be what you’re going for. It also depends on your chosen material, etc. Cork, for example, engraves jet black with the tiniest hint of laser power. Birch, on the other hand, takes a lot of burning to get decent color.

[dieterkutz]

Next stupid question. I added a map on the background. Is the only way I can keep from it engraving twice in the area of the logos, to put them all together in PS and then upload the picture?

[gmckayca]

It will engrave every separate element. So where there are overlaps, there will be double engraves. You need to combine into one picture

[dieterkutz]

thats what I thought. Just did that! thanks!! AGAIN!

[gmckayca]

The column of cuts, scores and engraves on the left side of the GF GUI is very useful in helping to show what the machine will be doing. Always check out each element that is depicted and confirm the machine will be doing what you want. Sometimes, there are extra cuts, scores or engraves that are shown there because of issues with the source file. Sometimes, you can simply click to IGNORE them. Other times, you need to fix the underlying file.

[Pearl]

It looks great! I would love to see the finished product.

[dieterkutz]

Me too, now I am having other issues…