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

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

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

Tips For Doing Sublimation

This is a preprint of a 2002 article I did.

Multiple Plate Layouts

One of the most common uses for doing sublimation is to produce metal plates. Whether they are round, rectangle, black or full colour the technique for doing these is the same. Lets say for this example that we are producing a number of round 2-inch plates. We want to do a multiple in Corel so that we can produce a number of the plates at once. … Continue Reading

Recreating Logos from bad artwork

Help File – hplogo_v9

One of the reasons that many engravers have upgraded their engraving equipment in the past years is because of the need to be able to easily create logos for their customers. Whether it is for a company such as IBM or just a local soccer association, most customers now require that you reproduce their logo. … Continue Reading

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