It’s our first Christmas since getting our Glowforge, and we’re going all out to show off our new tool.
This year for Christmas, everyone in the family is getting a new show piece for their kitchens - a cutting board with one of our Grandma’s handwritten recipes on it!
This project has helped me learn a lot about formatting images for engraving, and what I do/don’t like about the GF software’s image processing. To get more of her handwriting and less of the old card, I vectored the design in Illustrator and removed the background by hand. It was tedious, but I think it was totally worth it!
I started with a scan of the recipe card and uploaded it straight to the machine. I then did a test cut to see how the design actually worked and I was not impressed with how much the texture of an old note card was coming through and interfering with the handwriting. Plus, it was basically giving a border around the text where the note card was. I wanted the text to be a focal point and to be better integrated onto the board. Because of that, I decided to clean up the art.
You knocked it out of the park and your family is going to love such a personalized gift. (And the recipe sounds so good!)
You got a great result and nice even burn on the board too so obviously you don’t need any help. I do have a tip to help with the background/texture thing though.
If you bring it into your photo program you can first use your tone adjustment and burn brush to lighten the background and darken the text the best you can. Then if you convert it to greyscale you get the option to adjust every color and you can easily get rid of any remaining color in the background and get the text even darker. If you save it as a transparent PNG only the text will be brought into the GUI with no background.
I do have a tip to help with the background/texture thing though.
