Laser Engraving Photo Software
Not all engraving materials react linearly with laser power. This means that under a certain power the material is not marked, above this power becomes black without the possibility of shades. To get gray scale in this case dots are arranged is various patterns to simulate gray scale. Laser Photo Wizard uses various dithering tools. It also can increase the contrast of the image for better engraving.
Laser Photo Wizard can also turn a gray scale image into a sketch. This will make image fully black and white with no gray.
The main purpose of Laser Photo Wizard is to give you a toolbox of options to prepare your photo for the best output on any given material.
The created image can be sent to any laser engraver that has a print driver. If your laser does not have a print driver the image can be saved as a image file (.bmp, .jpg) or as a metafile that contains vector and bitmap information (.emf , .svg)
Click here for more information about the Pro Version.
Sample Dithered Output
Sample Sketch Output
3D Gray Engraving
Some of the newer lasers support 3D engraving. This mode changes the
power of the laser depending on the gray scale of the image. While 3D depth maps
are the best for this job they are hard to make. Laser Photo Wizard 5 assigns a
gray scale value to the dithered image to create a 3D look.
3D Gray is not true 3D. What it does is it raises the image off the background
then engraves the raised area. To do this the image needs to be a png file with
a transparent background. These files can easily be made by Photoshop and other
image editing software. You can also use
Green Screen Wizard to create a transparent background for any image shot on
a green screen.
Simply changing your text to white and will create raised letters on the
final image.
Click here to for a step by step guide to 3D
Gray.
Image Inversion and Mirroring
The system can also invert the photo, meaning that the black and white will
be reversed. On stone and Plexiglas the laser makes a white mark. This would
cause a negative image to be created. Turning on the inversion corrects this
problem.
When engraving Plexiglas you may want to engrave on the back of the plastic.
This would cause a mirror image to be formed. This is fixed by turning on
mirroring.
Actual Colby-Sketch Output on Plexiglas:
Add Text and Images
The system has an advanced text feature that lets you place text of any color
and font anyplace on the output. Text can be output as bitmap text or vector
text.
Actual output with text:
Cutout Images
When loading an image, you can choose to have the system trace it and output it
as vectors. The vectors can highlight or cut the image out depending on your
engraver settings.
In this example the black silhouette was imported as an image and converted
to cutting vectors to create this beautiful Christmas ointment: