This Laser Engraving Software prepares your photos with the click of a
button for high quality laser engraving on any material.
Actual output on pre-finished maple plywood
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Laser Engraving Photos
Green Screen Wizard has long been one of the top green screen removal systems
used by over 30,000 photographers worldwide. We achieved this goal by making
green screen photography easy to do. We have taken the framework of the Wizard
and adapted it to bring the same ease of use to preparing images for Laser
Engraving.
In normal mode Laser Engraving machines need an image that is pure black and white
with no gray scale. To achieve this color images are converted to black and
white grayscale images with many powerful conversion options. Once you have a
gray scale image you need to change the gray to black or white.
Laser Photo Wizard uses three methods to achieve this:
o Edge Sketching - This
method looks at the edges of an image to create a sketch of the image. This has
an artistic quality and works very well on low cost lasers.
o Dithering - This method
uses a series of black and white dots that are arranged so that the gray value
in and give area is preserved.
o Combined Dithering with
Sketch - This method, that works well with wood, increases the contrast of
the engraved image buy dithering and also considering the edges of the photo.
The system also has the ability
to add text, vector outlines and overlays to the image. A built in black and white editor is
offered in the pro version.
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New in version 5 - 3D Gray
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.
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Laser Photo Wizard Software Output Methods
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The Sketch will attempt to look at edges and create a solid sketch of the image.
This is very helpful because it is not only artistic, but lower cost lasers that
do not control their power and position as well still can do a nice rendering on
most materials.
There are sliders that let you control the thickness of the edge and what is white
and black.
Sample Sketch Output on Cherry:
Floyd-Steinberg Dithering
Floyd-Steinberg is a dithering algorithm. Dithering is converting a grayscale
image to black and white, such that the density of black dots in the new image
approximates the average grey level in the original.
As you can see this does not look very good. That is because the displays
output pixels do not match the converted image.
We can use the preview mode that takes the pure black and white for the laser
output and shows you how it might look on the final output.
You can also show how it might look on the material like wood. The software will
let you change this background image. This is not a perfect representation but
it gives you a good idea of what the final product might look like.
The preview mode does not change the output image only
what is shown on the screen.
Colby Dithering
The Colby dithering algorithm was developed for this product by the author, Ken
Colby. Like Floyd-Steinberg it tries to make the density of black dots in the
new image approximate the average grey level in the original. Unlike
Floyd-Steinberg it considers the original image and tries to arrange the dots so
that they tend to appear near the darker areas. This creates a image with higher
contrast but it is less smooth then the Floyd-Steinberg. It should always be
used if you are outputting landscapes or products but with people it is personal
choice.
The following output images show the Colby algorithm output but because of the
small size of the images the differences from the Floyd-Steinberg are subtle.
Sample Dithered Output on Granit:
This method, that works well with wood, increases the contrast of the engraved
image buy dithering and also considering the edges of the photo.
Actual Colby-Sketch Output on wood:
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Image Inversion and Mirroring
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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:
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:
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:
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Laser Photo Wizard Software
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Laser Photo Wizard Pro
o The Full Version supports all 3 conversion methods Sketch, Floyd-Steinberg
Dithering and Colby.
o 3D Gray engraving
o Vector Cutouts
o Dialogs for Color Balance, Rotation and Scaling are provided.
o With the Full version you can add simple labels.
o Overlays, png files with transparent area can be use to frame the image.
o The Pro System has a robust system for adding text and additional images to
your project.
o Skin Smoothing software make for better portrait output.
o Square, oval, and heart shaped frames can be added
o Lighting effects can be used the enhance the image
o A built in editor will let you clean up images especially in sketch mode.
For more information about the Pro system Click
Here...
Buy it now, for only $149.95 you will receive a license that can be used for 4
Windows computers