Photo Suggestions

[Margaret Turco]

Oh my gosh Tim, 300 different dogs! You must be an expert on these!

Steve, the b/c/i just looked good to me on this photo. I'm still figuring this out, too! I cropped first because I could then resample closer to the ultimate size since I didn't want the entire photo. I thought I had to convert to a bitmap so I could do the vignette. There may be an easier/better way to do that. I'm really trying to get an acceptable result without buying photograv since I still don't foresee doing very many photos.

[Steve Clarkson]

the last one on the bottom right is the same image put through Photograv on the granite setting.

I think I'm liking the results of Photograv less and less......

I think the 20p looked best.....I like the matboard idea too!

But I wanted this thread to be less about settings and more about what you do BEFORE lasering. How did you get yours to look so good Dee?

[Dee Gallo]

Dee, Did you remove the grass in the background, but just leave the rest of the picture alone?

Sorry, I guess I should have said what I did to the photo - duh!

I first took the 72 dpi jpeg and converted it to 300 dpi greyscale and changed the size from about an inch or so to 3 inches, using PhotoShop.

Then, I removed the background by hand using the eraser and adjusted the brightness to about -40 and the contrast to about plus 60. Sorry, I should have written those down. I did not play with the curves.... I used the magic wand to select the background and made it black. I guess you could also just use the black paintbrush and do the background with that to avoid one extra step.

Then, I airbrushed the fade with black and inverted the picture. That's all I did before importing it to CorelDraw to print. This is what the picture looked like... pretty ugly. The one on the right is before inverting.

[Frank Corker]

This is probably how I would do it.

[Dee Gallo]

Okay, here's a head-to-head comparison. Frank's new dog is on the right. The top one is 30 power, the bottom one is 15 power. The 30 was overpowered, it lost detail in the light areas. The 15 is darker and loses detail in the dark areas.

But what I want to know is how on earth did you (Frank) get that much detail off that little jpeg? When I imported it, it was gigantic and you could see every hair! Shrunk down, it has as much detail as my little one. All in all, it was a bit darker than mine, but very similar.

Are we getting anywhere Steve?

cheers, dee

[Steve Clarkson]

Sadly, I'm not.......but you, Margaret and Frank sure have figured something out!

I wonder if I took a photoshop class at the local community college.....

It seems like I know all the right things to do....ie. adjust tone/brightness/contrast etc. but I must not have an EYE for doing it the right way.

Anybody got an eye they can spare....

[Andrea Weissenseel]

This is a very interesting thread. I did not try photos on granite yet, but I do a lot on acrylic.

For pictures like this I prefer ovals, because I think they look softer and not so much "cut out"

I use photoshop to process the pictures. First I changed the picture to 300dpi and used a vignette action I downloaded from the internet. I'm using the "Gold Method" but I activate the dialog for the single steps so I can adjust the settings individually for the specific picture. For this one I used brightness -10 and contrast -40, in the next step (the first masking) I set the radius to 1.5 pixel - this is what came out

Andrea

[Steve Clarkson]

This is probably how I would do it.

Once again, you have proven your greatness!

OK.....did you crop, use the cut out lab or use a mask to grab on his face? I can tell you rotated it.....

[Steve Clarkson]

Once I've cut him out I would then adjust the contrast and brightness.

Hopefully soon we will have sufficient funds to invest in that training program I've seen the info posted on here about for Coreldraw!

Do you have a method to your madness when it comes to adjusting contrast and brightness?

Which training program?

[Steve Clarkson]

I'm kinda partial to ovals myself......even on a square tile.

The Gold method looks very similar to Photograv......but I'm not liking Photograv on granite so much........

Thanks for showing yours.

[Frank Corker]

OK.....did you crop, use the cut out lab or use a mask to grab on his face? I can tell you rotated it.....

Steve I use a really antiquated art program called Photostyler. It was made for windows 3.1 (if anyone can still remember that!) but I know it pretty much front to back so doing this kind of stuff is relatively easy. I think it was bought by Adobe who later went on to do the photoshop series, which explains why some of the more basic functions in that apply to Photostyler. I enlarged the picture, basic cut out on the head and roatated it, then finer cut out on the close up. Feather all the edges.

[John W. Love]

No method to my madness as far as adjusting brightness and contrast...and I think I'm doing it wrong because I was making the pictures lighter and Frank said to make them darker, and we all KNOW Frank is "The Man"!

As far as the Coreldraw classes I can't seem to find it although I searched, but I know John will know so I'll ask him in a bit...about to go wake him up so I can spend some time with him before I have to go to work at Chili's tonight. I've seen several references to it on the creek, but now I can't find any of them lol

[John W. Love]

Hey Steve, John here. Scott Shepherd posted a thread about the dvd deal he got from Advancedartist.com . I just noticed that the thread was moved to Deals and Discounts forum, but fortunately I had subscribed to the thread so it was easy to find. I also see that Tom Knight, who does the training videos posted on there that he was going to do some training videos geared towards engravers and carvers which would be awesome.
Here is the link to the thread. http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=89290

[Dave Johnson29]

It was made for windows 3.1 (if anyone can still remember that!)

Remember? Are you serious? I use it daily!!

OK, OK, not so much out of choice, but win3.1 is the only thing that will drive my laser.

[Frank Corker]

Remember? Are you serious? I use it daily!!

OK, OK, not so much out of choice, but win3.1 is the only thing that will drive my laser.

Hey weird, someone just told me the other day that he had managed to flog a load of original Windows 3.1 computer systems to some guys living in the sticks.