Laser Engrave Photo

[Lucie deLaBruere]

Does someone have a workflow that we can use with Middle school students who do not have access to Adobe Illustrator who want to engrave a photo on their laser cut projects. 

This particular students has a photo of his black dog, so their is not much contrast.
The students have chromebooks. (Although the teachers have 'real' laptops, but don't have Inkscape access at this time)

I remember Diane showing us TSJHome during our MIT maker workshop, but I've misplaced our directions. 

Any suggestions as to a workflow  that might work with beginners (middle school students) 

Lucie

[Justin Schmidt]

Hi Lucie,

We have a tutorial for acrylic mirrors that shows some techniques you can try. It's a little ways down the page on https://k12maker.mit.edu/tutorials.html

For a pic of a black dog, here's what I would do:

1. Remove background - use removebg.com or similar.
2. Convert to vector - picsvg.com is the best. Having your art as a vector is not necessary for engraving, but picsvg can make the pic into something that may work.

Justin Schmidt
Instructor

K-12 Maker Lab | MIT Edgerton Center

Email | LinkedIn

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Subject: [k-12-fablabs] Laser Engrave Photo

 

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[Katie Topper]

I am also working on a similar project, Lucie.

However, my preference would be to have the laser cut the outline of the person after engraving - like the outline of the dog in Justin's example below. Has anyone tried the trace command in Cuttle Premium? The trace command in Glowforge doesn't seem to do the job unless I am missing a step.

Though I can trace the outline myself with a bezier tool, I would like a bit of a shortcut for this current project. 

FYI, If the student has an iphone, Files app will easily remove the background from an image as will the newly launched Preview function.

Thanks all,

katie topper

[Lucie deLaBruere]

Katie

I just did autoTrace on Justin's Example, and I got 9 paths.  I hid all but the path for the outline and got a nice path of the outline only.  I think that worked well because of the dark image of the dog.  

I tried AutoTracing a screenshot (PNG) of the  second picture of the dog after SVG conversion and got 170 paths and did not get one clean outline path to cut an outline with.  I expanded up the one path to see if I might find a clear path there and it had over 3000 anchor points.  So this image obviously would not work. 

So I tried the AutoTrace feature with a picture of the statue of Liberty we took recently.  I removed the background first and it did a nice job getting an outline I could trace.   (I added the original picture here to show the original, but I did not Autotrace that one; I autotraced the one with removed background. 

Katie, Have you used the new K12 option for Cuttle? 

This is the form to get access to the free K12 version. 

Lucie

[Kimberly Fogarty]

In terms of trace issue- what about the offset tool? I may not have a full grasp of the task, but I use offset frequently when cutting around an object.

Kim

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