Creating a Half Circle Equipment Tag
In this article I will discuss how to recreate a tag that was sent to me by a customer to recreate for their laser machine.
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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 …
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 …
Check out my video help files that I have created over the years. Go to Video Help Files
In this article I will discuss how to recreate a tag that was sent to me by a customer to recreate for their laser machine.
In this article we will look at how to take a customer supplied artwork in a Doc file and import it into CorelDraw. Once we have imported it in we will vector the artwork. Because this name badge is going to be done on reverse material and be done in 2 painted colours we will need to separate the logo into colours, which is why I am vectoring the artwork, and than laser each colour and paint each colour.
I will be using Google Docs to open the word doc for those that do not have Word on their computers.
Sometimes when you have to set up for a coaches plaque or a annual plaque where you are engraving all the names it is easier to use a table layout. A table keeps all the text in line, spaced and you can justify the cells if you want.
A number of people that have Vision Engravers want to send jobs directly from CorelDraw to the engraver. With the Vision S3 controllers you can do this very easily
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
Here is a request from a customer to create a big heart made up of a bunch of smaller hearts that follow along the shape of the heart. This was easy to do in CorelDraw using the blend command. I have used this command a number of times to create everything from dashes to ropes to stars. … Continue Reading
This is part 2 in our series on laser engraving photos. One of the problems with getting photos from customers is that the quality of the photo is out of our hands. A lot of people do not realize that the success of any photo that is lasered engraved is directly related to the quality of the original photo. The better the quality of the photo the better the photo will be reproduced on the laser.
Back in earlier years when we where given a photo and asked to scan it into our computer we at least had the opportunity to control the quality of the photo that got scanned in. Our only problem tended to be the moire pattern that occurred. Now most of the photos that we get are digital and we receive them via email or memory stick. The problem that we have with receiving images this way is that we are at the mercy of the image settings that where setup in the digital camera. This tutorial will focus on the ins and outs of working with digital photos.
… Continue Reading
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
"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.
This is typically more prevalent on early versions of CorelDraw up to X4. However I have seen it happen in X5. If you are having troubles getting AI (Adobe Illustrator) files into CorelDraw than open them up in Adobe Reader and than re save them as a PDF. Then open them up in CorelDraw. This tutorial will show you how to do this. I will assume you have the latest version of Adobe reader on your computer which is free so there is no reason not to have it.
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