Feature Request: Negative engraving

The engraving feature works really well and understandably the default setting is that black is engraved and white is untouched.

My request is a checkbox button (or other UI method) to provide the option to invert that.

11 Likes

Of course, you can do this at design time but it would be nice to be able to toggle it from the GFUI.

4 Likes

Would be handy. Though an easy workaround is to just invert the colors (make it a negative) in an image editor.

1 Like

This is a tricky one. For example if you have a 1” circle and you hit invert, should it invert the whole 20x12 area and engrave all of it but the circle?

4 Likes

No. There, tricky problem solved.

1 Like

I don’t see much of an application for this personally. I’ve never had a time when I wanted the whole bed engraved instead of just one object.

I think the gist of this post was if someone had an object with negative space inside it to invert that with the positive space, while staying inside the bounds of the object. Determining those bounds would be difficult if not impossible in some cases

2 Likes

The GFUI seems to do a good job knowing what the parameters of my engrave image are. Inverting the colors purely within those bounds would be the common sense way of doing it.

There are two good use cases I can think of for this sort of feature:

  1. Inverting an image in a graphics editor is do-able but sometimes trickier than you would think. If I have an illustrator file or PNG with black and transparent, inverting will turn the black to white and do nothing to the transparent. So I would have to add another layer or fill the transparent space etc.
  2. Using a jig. If I want to engrave one side of an object positively and the other side negatively, I don’t want to have to load a new image and hope that the alignment is perfect.

That’s what I’m saying. Nobody wants to invert the whole bed, just the image to be engraved. It might not make sense to apply this to vector art, but since engraves are raster anyway, it’s probably not that hard to do the thing people want most of the time.

Problem is, as we’ve seen, if you do something that works most of the time, people are really mad when it doesn’t. On some of these things, it probably makes more sense to keep polishing what they’ve got rather than adding more surface area for people to be upset with. For now, anyway.

3 Likes

What if this were an option specific to picture engraves, a checkbox option along with the vary power option?

1 Like

If you are talking about in a raster image, yeah that seems totally doable, and I agree with you

I also think a mirror option would be incredibly helpful

1 Like

I have seen a lot of raster engraves where the engraved part of the image looks lighter than the main image (like on slate). A negative engrave would come in handy for that.

1 Like

Exactly. I thought originally he was talking about vector objects.

Invert raster would definitely be helpful. I think I’ve even posted the same thread a while back

The tricky part is that often you want to remove the background when inverting otherwise you get a big box around the inverted image. (Obviously if the background was transparent to begin with it’s not an issue.) It would be difficult for the GFUI to figure out what to trim. But for images that already have a transparent background it would work great.

1 Like