Doing Photos in CorelDraw with your Laser Engraver – Introduction

November 23, 2010 Corel and Sublimation, CorelDraw Help, Laser Engraving Help, Photographs, Sublimation 2 Comments

Laser Engraving or Sublimating Photographs

One of the biggest issues that faces us as engravers is reproducing photos onto a variety of products. Reproducing photos is not easy – even for those of us who have done a lot of it. Part of the problem is that there are so many substrates to work on and so many different types of photographs. There are some off the shelf programs that have tried to make doing photos easier but they tend to have mixed results. Programs such as PhotoLaser Plus, 1 Touch Photo and PhotoGrav provide these so called one click fits all solutions. PhotoLaser and PhotoGrav have gone one step further in that they will also give you the ability to tweak the image from within their software and have it try and display the image on a simulated display of the material you are working on. This tweaking can give you better results. However my experience with these programs is that they are again hit and miss. Why they are hit and miss can be caused by a number of factors and when you understand these factors you can achieve a better chance of getting it right. Which is why I am doing this series of articles. Hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion that rains down on this topic – and not only in our industry. … Continue Reading

Why You Should Only Use JPEGS for Photographs

June 24, 2010 CorelDraw Help No Comments

When it comes to formats for exchanging files one of the more common formats that we use is JPEGS. JPEGS are good because most people can create them, the file size is small and when you say JPEG to someone they know what you are talking about. The problem with JPEGs is that they are good for photos but not so good for logos or other so called line art type images. The big problem with JPEGS is that they typically save the files with Anti Aliasing on. … 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.

Creating an Oval Vignette

April 28, 2010 CorelDraw Help No Comments

One of the more popular techniques used with photographs is turning that photograph in to what it is called a vignette. The vignette is a technique where you start to fad an image from a predetermined spot in a photo and fad it to nothing at the edge of the photo. Creating an an oval vignette is the most popular technique and is used extensively by photographers. In this article we will use the powerclip function in CorelDraw to create out oval cutout. Than we will use the vignette command in CorelDraw to create our vignette

Changing the Zoomed View in CorelDraw

April 27, 2010 CorelDraw Help No Comments

How many times have you brought an object into CorelDraw only to see a low resolution rendition of the image. I know I have have and there is a reason. Typically to try and get all the objects on the screen our default view is 100%. 100% view is based on the document not the image. To be able to view the image and see a good quality image we will need to zoom in it. Note: this is different in Corel PhotoPaint where the zoom view is based on the object not the document.