PhotoVCarve

[Clarence Miller]

I had posted this earlier in the engraving forum, thankfully I was guided to post here.


"I have been thinking about purchasing Photocarve for my CNC router. I currently have DeskCNC which does good for the DXF parts that I machine out and cutting out lettering for signs. I am no near so impressed with the way that it converts photos to code. When I did my wedding photo it made my beard give me the appearance of a zombie with his jaw shot off. The tux made the whole carving rather creepy. In playing around with the Photocarve allowing me to make certain colors transparent b perhaps beards will look fuzzy and not macabre. Also I just purchased the ingroove tooling from Amana so I can change inserts without having to take the bit out of the collete.
Am I barking up the wrong tree with photo carve or is it as good as the website says. I was looking into buying a laser and using that for my photoengraving but I have the router. I am not scrapping the laser idea but I think I will only be happy with an epilog and not the chinese version that I can conceivably afford at this time.
Thanks for letting me ramble and please give me your nickels worth of free advice. "

[Russ Revels]

Good Morning Clarence,

I don't have Photo Carve but look at the forum on the Vectric site regularly and have seen some amazing photos. You might want to post on the PhotoCarve section of the Vectric forum for so expert answers to your question.

Go to vectric dot com and select forums and it is about half way down the page.

Russ

[Steve Peterson]

I have PhotoVCarve and still end up pre-processing the pictures. It appears to be set up for carving lithopanes which need the variable depth setting to control the amount of light shining through.

I want to carve a block of wood, add a dark filler, then sand to reveal the light colors. The picture wants to be pure black and white, not gray scale. So I pre-process the picture using a photo editor to make the picture black and white before sending it to PhotoVCarve. There may be ways to do this directly, but pre-processing seems to be the easiest way for me. I still feel like it is a great program at a good price for what it does.

Steve