Soon to be new user has questions

Hi there Glowforge Community, I’m waiting on delivery of a basic machine. I’ve been doing a lot of looking on these forums and doing general research on using there machine so I can have some knowledge out of the gate. A couple of things Im wondering about;
1 -I use photoshop for art prep, I can save to svg format in photoshop. So am I correct to assume that if I rasterize the type layer, color the things I want to engrave, score & cut in different colors, and save to svg format, I’ll be able to open the file and direct the machine to perform different operations on those layers?
2 - I read a lot of post from people who are having issues with their machines that require shipping the machine back and waiting for a replacement, all the while panicking about finishing a job they have scheduled for delivery when they might not have a machine to do the job. Are there groups of Glowforge owners separated by state? Should there be now. It would be great to have a back up plan for situations like this, wouldn’t it?

  1. Ans. Yes you should be good by doing it like that.

  2. Facebook has a group, the Glowforge Users Group or GUG. A LOT of questions on there, tons of help to when things go weird with your gf. It isn’t by state but some of the posts ask 'Where are you? or Can anyone in Denver help out? etc… Re: Sending the machine back? I think if everyone who has had no problems posted you would see more posts than complaints. I’ve had mine for years, no problem.

And welcome to the clan, it is both frustrating and fun.

Craig

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Hi! Welcome, you’re going to have so much fun!

Regarding Photoshop: it’s fantastic for prepping photos and other things to ENGRAVE. It’s not great for cutting and scoring though, even though it’s capable of saving out SVG. For cutting and scoring you’ll need to create vectors (PS is a raster based program with very limited vector capabilities) . Illustrator, Inkscape, Fusion 360, Silhouette Studio and Affinity Designer are the vector design programs that get talked about the most here on the forum. If you search on any of them here you’ll get lots of GF tips. They range from free to $20-50/month. If you’re already on the full Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop then Illustrator will be included along with tons of fonts.

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The Facebook group is a terrible place to get help, there’s no search ability and the technical level of the bulk of the users is quite low.

I’d advise sticking with the forum. Facebook is the worst.

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A raster program will only print black no matter what colors you use and each raster will have its own layer. So if you combine a dozen rasters as different things it will give a dozen layers each needing a separate adjustment of settings.

If you have special “elevation” grayscale rasters the darkest part will go to the maximum power you set and each level of gray bill be powered to the level of the gray (50% gray = 50% power ) with white ignored.

For normal B&W photos, this can be very weird. For those, you need dot dither where every dot is full power but concentrated in dark areas and more scattered in light areas. This looks more like newspaper photos in low rez, but high rez can be extremely good. You can, of course, come back after with sharpie pens and color stuff :grin:

You can look about your area for Maker groups or post here naming your city for folks to get together that are near there.

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You might consider organizing a get-together for the Glowforge users (and curious) in your area in order to get to know them.

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There is this:

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