How to Laser Engrave White on Red Engraving Plastic Using CorelDraw

A lot of people have problems with plastics that either have a red or blue top on white or vice versa a white top and either a red or white core. The problem that people have is typically a contamination of the colour that invades the white and discolours the white core. In some of the earlier days of laser engraving I use to have a lot of problems with the Rowmark Lasermark series. However this problem for me has become a non issue since the release of our new Encore laserable product. This product has a very good acrylic core and the pigments from the colours do not migrate like they do on other plastics. However there is one thing as a laser engraver that you have to do and that is use the least amount of power that you can. This is not only in raster engraving but also in vector engraving. The problem that people have is that they use way to much power. In this video I am going at 100% speed, 19% power and 600 DPI on a 60 watt laser. DO NOT USE WHAT YOUR LASER SUPPLIER SAYS – TEST YOUR MATERIALS WITH YOUR LASER. Click here

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Set Up Lesson – Changing the Colours in a Logo in CorelDraw

November 9, 2010 CorelDraw, CorelDraw Help No Comments

"I have a question. I have attached a logo.

Will it engrave properly on the encore gold and black, the logo is coloured and if I convert it to b & w it looks awful, am I doing it right
Chris"
This is a pretty standard question that I get from customers. So let us go through the techniques to engrave this logo. I am going to show you how to change the colours in a vector image.

Importing in a Zip file to Coreldraw

July 7, 2010 CorelDraw, CorelDraw Help 1 Comment

One of the problems that we have with computers is that a lot of the files that we work with are large in size. in earlier times when download speeds where more of an issue it was advantageous to compress a file into a zip fie to make it smaller. Now a days this is not as much of a factor as download speeds are a lot faster. A lot of files that are sent now are compressed already so they can not be made any smaller. Files such as CorelDraw files (see the end of this article for an example), PDF, JPEG and most TIF can not be made any smaller. But still some people send them this way so I have taken some time to explain this. Note: this example is in XP. Vista and Win 7 work the same way.

Thermark Coverage Spec Sheet

June 26, 2010 CorelDraw No Comments

A lot of people ask me what the coverage is for Thermark / Cermark. This is because the material is not cheap. But it does the job and it does it a lot cheaper than some other methods so I guess in the grand scheme of things it is rather inexpensive.

Weld – Creating a Legend Plate

June 21, 2010 CorelDraw Help No Comments

A lot of times over the years I have been asked or needed to recreate an object that someone else has created. These objects could be logos or web graphics or legend plates. A lot times the image that I have been given needs to be redrawn as the original was not good enough. A lot of times having to redraw something is not the most desirable thing that I want to do. But to get the proper quality this has to be done. … Continue Reading

Creating Photos On Wood

April 30, 2010 CorelDraw Help, Laser Engraving Help, Lasers 2 Comments

One of the more requested topics that I get asked for is how to laser engrave photos on wood. Although a lot of your success is going to be dependent on the amount of testing that you do and the photos that you recieve from your clients there are some basic steps that you can take to make your chances of success a little more positive. There is nothing special here. All you need to remeber is that wood is porus and will not hold a fine detailed photo. So do not worry about getting rid of the detail in a photo. It make actually make your engraved photo look better.

Working with Cropping Photos – Creating an Oval Crop

April 27, 2010 CorelDraw, CorelDraw Help, Lasers 7 Comments

A lot of times when you are working with photos you need to crop the photo so that you can focus in on a certain part of the photo. Typically what we are trying to do is to get rid of certain parts of the photo that we do not want. Cropping is the way to do this. There are a number of ways you can crop in CorelDraw. Sometimes it depends on the version that you are working in. For example a rectangle proper cropping tool was not available in CorelDraw until X4. In this article we will look at Power Clipping an image to do an oval crop in CorelDraw. To take it one step further we will look at doing an oval crop in Corel PhotoPaint

CorelDraw Text Basics Part 1

April 11, 2010 Corel and Sublimation, CorelDraw, Lasers No Comments

There are two types of text in CorelDraw. The first and the one that is used a lot is Artistic Text. The second type which we discuss later is Paragraph text.