I am trying to make a puzzle for a friend out of a picture she provided. I have the picture uploaded. I keep getting the error “Print Size your image is too large and complex to print. You can shrink it, change settings or print in pieces”.
I know you can print/engrave pictures. People do it all the time. Is there any guidance here as to how to fix this and what settings to change?
Thanks!
It’s hard to tell what the hold-up is without seeing the particular file, because it could be caused by any of the issues listed.
Assuming that the image is rasterized and is no larger than 19.4" by 10.9" (for a little leeway) you might be trying to engrave at too high of an LPI. Try using the SD Engrave or the Draft Engrave setting.
Here’s the image. I found out that an SVG file can be raster or vector which I didn’t know. I’m currently working on the image and puzzle pieces separately. I’m working on converting the puzzle pieces to a vector svg. so that I can cut and not just engrave. The rest I’m still clueless on. I really wanted this in HD. if possible. Does this picture help at all? What other info would be needed? I’m sorry I’m just a super novice at this, but this gift is pretty important to me so I want to make sure I can do it.
Okay, couple of things…the HD Engrave setting for engraves is going to engrave deeper and it will char more, but you are going to get just as good an image (for large sized puzzles like this one) if you use the SD Engrave setting. And it will send less data to the machine so it won’t overload the buffer. But it has nothing to do with the resolution of the picture…if that one starts out as a high definition image, it will be engraved that way.
What is kind of important when you are engraving photos is to bump the contrast a little…it makes for a much cleaner engrave instead of a muddy-looking mess. And you’ll want to use the Photo Engrave settings, which is dithered.
There are a couple of great tutorials here for prepping the photo for engraving:
https://glowforge.com/support/topic/first-three-prints/Prep%20a%20Photo%20Engrave%20in%20Photoshop
https://glowforge.com/support/topic/first-three-prints/Prep%20a%20Photo%20Engrave%20with%20Gimp
Great! Thank you! I’ll take a look at those! 
Thanks for the answer @Jules , that’s right.
@k9mastery , could you give Jules’ suggestion a try and let us know how it goes?
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.
