I have a picture of my grandparents that is very old. I would like to engrave it to an acrylic blank to use with a light base but don’t really know how to make it look nice. I keep getting a total white engraving of the whole picture including the background.
First you would need to scan the picture into a digital file. The Trace function in the Glowforge software is not the best thing to use for an old photograph, since it relies on sharp contrast, and most old photos do not have good contrast any more.
If you can get a good high resolution scan of the photo (you might be able to get one made at an Office store or a place like Kinkos if you don’t have a flatbed scanner) then you can open the picture in a program like Photoshop or GIMP and adjust the contrast so that it will print better. That’s how you prepare a photo to turn it into a lamp with the Glowforge.
Then you would have to pull the corrected photo into a vector file that has your shape for cutout. (In Inkscape or Illustrator.)
It’s a fair bit of work to get the photo ready, but after that you can just use the Photo Engrave settings on the Glowforge interface to get a very nice result.
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If you’re using GIMP here are some instructions from GF:
Or Photoshop:
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Thank you so much!
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