Working with Encore EconoFlex Material

Material – Engravers Express EconoFlex .025 thick plastic engraving material. This material is available in Brushed gold, silver and bronze. The core is made up of acrylic for easy cutting by lasers. The material can have 3M adhesive applied to the back of the material.

Application – Trophy Plates

Why Use EconoFlex?  When it comes to creating an engraving plate there are a number of steps involved. Aside from setting up the plates in CorelDraw and entering the text you have to engrave the plates, cut them out with a shear and then tape them. Note: some customers require either a scallop or a radius corner to help “spruce” up the plate. Using EconoFlex allows us to speed up our job for a number of reasons. … Continue Reading

Changing the Default Line Properties in CorelDraw

By default the line properties of a line are in Points, are hairline (note in X4 the line thickness is .014. At this thickness the line will automatically raster engrave instead of vector cutting) in thickness and is black in colour. If you would like different attributes you will need to change the values in the option menu.

First you need to open the “Options” menu by going to the tools menu – see Figure 1. … Continue Reading

Working with Corel PhotoPaint’s Contrast Enhancement

One of the problems that you may face when you are doing photographs is that your photos may be to “dark” or maybe to “light”. Figure 1 shows a photo that falls into the category of being to “dark”. If you look at the photo you will notice that the highlights (the cupboards are “grayish” not white) are not white but gray. This is a tell tale sign that the image lacks the proper information in the highlight areas. This lack of information is shown as a photo that is to dark or has a colour cast. Although there maybe other issues with the image, this exercise will concentrate on quickly correcting contrast issues that can happen when you are giving a photograph. Sometimes the results achieved by a few mouse clicks can greatly enhance an image. So let us get started. … Continue Reading

Changing the Fill in an Image

Many times it is advantageous to change the fill of an Image. Maybe you want to change the colour. Maybe you would like to change the fill from 100% black to 60% black (useful for engraving images on glass). This tutorial is set out to explain the fill routine.

The first step is to make sure that we have a vector image (a line drawing). To make sure you have a vector image you can go into “View => Wireframe”. Your image should look like figure 1. If the image is a grey box than the image is a bitmap and you can not do this technique. Note: if the image was black and white and a bitmap than you can do it but we will leave that to another discussion. … Continue Reading

Changing the Width of the Vector Line

When you need to do a vector cut on a laser it is imperative that the line width on your vector line should be .001 thousand of an inch. By default in CorelDraw the line width is Hairline or .003 of an inch. Note: in X4 this default is .014. On a laser this is no good and means that our vector line is going to raster instead of cutting. For this reason we need to make the line width say Hairline or .001. … Continue Reading

If you are still using Corel 9 and want to use the print merge I suggest that you upgrade to X4 as the print merge function is a lot better in X4 than version 9.

Using print merge In CorelDraw

Print merge lets you print the same document or plate many times using different text each time. For example, if you are printing a number of engraving plates for a certain trophy size, you can personalize each plate by merging in different names.
Print merge works by combining a specially formatted text file with a CorelDRAW file. The CorelDRAW file must contain text to replace with words from the text file during the print merge. Each time the CorelDRAW file is printed; words from the text file are substituted with the printed version. … Continue Reading

Now it is time to click in another area to repair that area. If you look you have two points on the cursor – a “+” sign and an “o”. The plus sign is where you are sampling and the “o” is where the sample is being placed. … Continue Reading

Problem: When working with photographs occasionally you are presented with a photograph that is contaminated with finger prints, has ripped edges or creases. Sublimating this image is not a good idea as the final image is only going to look as bad as the original.

Solution: The best way to fix up these imperfections is with the clone tool that is provided in Corel PhotoPaint. … Continue Reading

Arcing Engraving Part 2

We have gone over creating arcs so let us look at a few more manipulations that can be done with text that is arc. We originally talked about how we can manipulate our text size, position and circle size.
Let us look at how we can manipulate the actual fonts and characters on the arc. … Continue Reading