Working with Black Granite – Adjusting a Picture of the Eagles

Adjusting a Picture of the Eagles

In this example we will be lasering an image of an eagle onto black laser tile. Figure 1 shows a photo that I bought off the Internet. I am using this image because I want to see what the effect of having our background image being a bit out of focus and to see how it appears on the tile.
Click here to download the Corel example file

Figure 1 shows us the original image I bought off the Internet for $3

… Continue Reading

Check Out My Videos

Check out my video help files that I have created over the years.

Laser Engraving Wood

Laser Engraving Wood

It may seem trivial to talk about laser engraving wood but considering that it is one of the products that most of us do a lot than we should spend some time talking about it. We can talk about raster engraving and vector engraving as two separate processes when it comes to wood.

Raster Engraving Wood

When a laser is raster engraving (Figure 1 shows us some samples of raster engraved images) the laser marks with a back and forth motion. This motion is similar to what you would see with a laser printer or an inkjet printer. The laser slowly moves its way down the table. The amount of the movement is dictated by the dpi that has been chosen in the driver. When we are engraving a message in wood we use the raster movement of the laser to create the message. … Continue Reading

How to Use the Website

How to Use this WebSite

Articles

Articles are posted as they are produced. The newest ones appear on the main page the oldest ones on the last page. To view older posts than what appears on the main  page select “Older Entries” that appears at the bottom of the page.

Thermark (Cermark) (Cerdec) Metal Marking Spray

Cermark / Thermark Metal Marking Spray

The TherMark process utilizes marking materials, or “inks,” available in various forms, which are applied to surfaces to be marked. The ink is then selectively fused – using patented laser marking technology – to the surface with a regular industrial marking laser. Finally, any excess ink is easily cleaned from the surface. The inks are scientifically formulated to make a permanent, chemical bond to surfaces, without compromising or damaging the material being marked.

TherMark marking materials are available as paintable liquids, aerosols or adhesive transfer tapes. The paintable liquid may be applied to surfaces with a brush, sponge or air sprayer. After fusing with the laser, any excess paintable liquid or aerosol spray can be cleaned from the surface by simply rinsing with water. Tapes are applied to surfaces using their own light adhesives. After fusing with the laser, the tape is lifted from the surface, carrying away any excess marking material. The used tape is then discarded.

Regardless of the application, the end result is a durable, high-contrast and high-resolution mark. (as appears from the Thermark web site) … Continue Reading

CorelDraw’s Object Manager

Working with CorelDraw’s Object Manager and How It Controls Your Engraver.

The object manager can be found in the “Tools” menu. See Figure 1. Note: for this example, make sure you have no objects on your page – so start a new file. … Continue Reading

Creating an AutoLayout in CorelDraw

Creating an Auto Layout in CorelDraw

Help File – Autolayout

Level – Intermediate to Advanced

For anyone who has owned a rotary engraver the one feature that we miss when we go to CorelDraw is a simple auto layout.

What is Auto Layout? Well basically it is a command that was controlled by one key. When you pressed this key your text and or logos would automatically space themselves out on the engraving plate.

CorelDraw can do this put it lacks the one-keystroke approach that we had in our rotary engraving software.

In this tutorial we will show you how to create a couple of an Autolayout a couple of different ways.

Once we have created the Autolayout we will create a one-button hotkey to activate the Autolayout.

To do this we will need to create what is known as a Macro. … Continue Reading

Creating a New Logo From Bad Artwork – Aids Logo

Now let me ask you – how many people come into your shop and say “I need you to reproduce my logo and to make it easy here is some good quality black and white artwork”. Not often. What do we get?

• Low quality gif and jpeg files (images from the internet)
• “Faxed” artwork – the ones with the “jaggies”
• Business cards
• Full colour images

The list goes on. So what can we do? Typically what I see is that dealers scan the bad image into the computer, vectorize the artwork and then sometimes spend hours “cleaning” up the logo. This may be a suitable way of doing artwork for some but not me. I would rather spend my time doing something else. So let me offer you an alternative that will give you a good clean vector image and hopefully do it in a lot less time. … Continue Reading

Creating a Basic Plaque Layout

Getting Started – Creating a 1 by 3 Name Badge

When we are looking at using CorelDraw we have to start some where. For most of us this means creating some sort of layout. When you are working in CorelDraw everything you do is a layout. In this section we will look at creating two different products. These exercises are intended to be easy and straight forward. The first product will be a basic 3 line engraving name plate. There will be no logo just text. The second lesson will deal with creating a laser engraved plate which incorporates a logo and some text. … Continue Reading

Getting Rid of that White Box

Problem: When I bring in my scanned file I get a white box around the image. This is a problem when I place the image on a coloured box. How do I get rid of the box?

First of all we need to scan our item. Now there is two ways that we can do this. The first way will be do the operation in Corel.

Open up Corel and import the scanned item into Corel. For this lesson we use a logo I received from a customer that was having the same problem. See figure 1. … Continue Reading