Laser Photo Wizard - with Generators

Laser Photo Wizard Pro is powerful laser engraving software for creating images ready for Laser Photo Engraving. The system offers extensive controls to convert gray scale photos to engravable black and white images.

Laser Photo Wizard Pro solves many of the issues that plague photo engraving.
The product has 5 conversion systems to accommodate the quality or the laser and the type of material being engraved. When engraving, especial on wood, image contrast can be lost. Special algorithms have been added to increase contrast.

The program also supports overlays, extensive text, decorative frames and cutting frames. It also can add small images to the main image that can be added as an image or vectors. An Editor is supplied to make small changes to the output.

Laser Photo Wizard supports generators that can create boxes, trays, connected text or birdhouses.


We recommend you try the FREE DEMO to convince yourself that Laser Photo Wizard Pro truly is fun to use and creates amazing output.

Buy it now, for only $149.95 you will receive a license that can be used for 4 Windows computers   

Laser Engraving Image Preparation

This method simpley converts color image to black and white

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.

Floyd-Steinberg is a dithering algorithm. Dithering is converting a grayscale image to black and white no gray, such that the density of black dots in the new image approximates the average grey level in the original.

If you look at a close up of this method you can see how smooth the output is. The problem is that fine details are lost.

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 Colby dithering algorithm works well for details but it does not give smooth results like Floyd-Steinberg. Colby Dot Migration starts with Floyd-Steinberg Dithering but then it uses a proprietary algorithm to move the dots to increase local contrast. It can be very effective but it can also create artifacts so a slider is provided in the advanced settings section to let you select how much of the effect your want.

This method, that works well with wood, increases the contrast of the engraved image by dithering and also considering the edges of the photo.

The problem with laser photo engraving is that most photos are of such low contrast that they do not engrave well. Colby dithering helps to fix that. Colby Sketch does fix it but the results do not always look photo realistic. Smart contrast looks at edges and surrounding areas to compute contrast. This technique has 2 part level and radius. The level setting determines how strong the effect, the radius setting will determine how wide an area is considered for the background. You can set these factors with sliders in advanced settings or you can simply use the radio buttons to set the sliders for you.
Radio Buttons (the defult)


No Contrast, Mild, Strong and Very Strong

3D Gray takes a PNG file with a transparent background and creates a 3D like engraving. How it works is anyplace that is transparent is changed to black, the highest engraving value. Any place that is not transparent is dithered using the selected dithering algorithm. You can select the gray level for the dithered image. Selecting a low number will make it look like the image is a raised cutout. Selecting a high number will make it look like an engraved image. Selecting a min range number like 100 will give a 3D like appearance to the output. To do 3D Gray, Check the 3D Gray Box an select a dithering method.

Click here to for a step by step guide to 3D Gray.

Display Modes

This mode shows the actual pixel of the image that is closest to the display pixel. The problem is that the output pixels do not match the display pixels so you get what looks like a mess of dots.

You can zoom in on the image and the dots will make more sense.

With Gray mode the display pixel is the sum of the nearby output pixels. This makes the image look closer to the final output image.

This is the same a gray mode but the white background is replaced with an image. You can select your background image in the settings area.

This inverts the gray mode and is used to show how something might look on a dark background like granite. To use this make sure you pick a dark background photo.

Of course if you are going to output a photo on a dark substance you should use one with a dark background. See the Support section on how to use Green Screen Wizard to do this.

Laser Photo Wizard Features

With only a simple file open it is difficult to find a photo to process. Many photographers used a separate program to review the images and then used the Wizard to process the selected image. This will no longer be necessary with the Compare Image feature. This feature will create large thumbnail images for you to look at. You can drag any image to one of 4 review windows so that you can compare even larger images. You can double click on the thumbnail or the image in the compare window and it will be loaded as the image to process. This features takes a few minutes to create the thumbnails but it is worth the wait.

The Pro Studio Version of Laser Photo Wizard has a custom version of Green Screen Wizards Airbrush Editor that makes it easy to edit black and white photos. It works best cleaning up sketch mode photos. The dithered photos are difficult to edit because the pattern of dots is easily disturbed. You can use the copy mode for these images and you can clear a background for text for dithered images.

In Green Screen Wizard Skin Smoothing helps to remove blemishes and wrinkels and give the skin a glow. What skin smoothing adds in the Laser Photo Wizard is the ability to apply white makeup that makes faces lighter for a more pleasant output.

The Laser Photo Wizard has an powerful framing system. It lets you apply an inner frame and an outer frame. If the outer frame is white then it can make the image look like it is floating. You can choose Square , Oval, Heart or Jagged Frames. The frame can be solid or you can load an image. The frames are added before the effect so that they will be dithered or sketched depending on the effect selected.

In version 4 you can now use the framing system to vector cut the output. This makes it very easy to create plaques on thin materials.

Sample that uses frame to cut output.

Lighting Effects let you emphasize areas of the photo, or create side lighting. The example shows first the girl with no lighting then the butterfly lightened by the circle lighting effect. The second photo shows sheet lighting, used best on close up portraits

Often you would like to output letter and images to a Laser Engraver that are not connected. The connection grid option makes it easy to do this. It is great for creating paper greeting cards or window art.

The Wizard gives your control of brightness, contrast and saturation as well as independent control of the red ,green and blue balance. You can use these controls to correct poorly exposed images or images with bad color balance. They can also be use to fine tune the black and white conversion.

Scale, Placement and Rotate It is important to fit the foreground to the background. The Wizard give you control of the scale, placement and rotation of the images.

Overlays are png files with a transparent section. They can be used to create elaborate frames for your work as well as add text to the image. Often the image has to be moved and scaled to fit it the opening. You can create your own overlays with Photoshop.

> In the full version you can put 2 labels at 9 preselected positions. The labels can be Xlarge, Large, Med, or Small. You can have them in white or black in the Times Roman, Arial or Cursive font.

Generators

Create any kind of box or tray using our powerful Box Generator. These boxes make great gifts when the box is personalized with a photo or text.
Click here for more information about the Box Generator.

The Box Generator proved to be a very useful and fun option. It was decieded to add other generators. The first one was a birdhouse generator. This generator can create 3 different kinds of birdhouses, Traditional, Flat Roof and Tapered Bottom.
Click here for more information about the Birdhouse Generator.

People love seeing fancy text, especially their own name. This feature makes it easy to make dramatic text signs. The connected text options is just what it sounds like, this generator will create text that is connect to a base or connected to itself. You can select the font and the size and other options. This generator will create an output image to be engraved and a black image that can be vectorized for cutting the image out. The basic styles that can be created are:

Click here for more information about the Connected Text Generator.

Some Examples