Laser Ready Art from Laserbits

[Stephen Beckham]

Well, one man's opinion - but I've got my second CD from them and their description of the Memorial CD and the actual Memorial CD left me disappointed like the first CD I bought from them.

"Laser Ready art that's easily imported to Corel" - yes easy to import, but the image quality is less than 'ready' to laser. I'm not trying to put down LB, I get stuff from them all the time that I'm pleased with.

My point on this is to those getting in this buisness, if you buy a $14.95 product - expect a $14.95 result. All the images can be cleaned up, but just be careful when buying software to realize that, the cheaper packages will require more work from you. The $400 packages that absolutely hurt the capital flow, will provide the true laser ready art...

I'm not sure if this type post violates TOS, I don't believe it does. It's more of a expression to other peers to be careful when choosing artwork. See attached sample for chopped up snapshot of one of the files.


MODS - if it violates - sorry, please dispose of as necessary.

[Steve Clarkson]

Are you kidding me? That's what MOST of my stuff looks like! Just kidding.....but it raises a Corel question for me......is there an EASY way to fix those jagged edges (like a smoothing tool?) without re-drawing the whole thing?

[Dan Hintz]

For raster-based stuff (assuming that's a very small portion of a larger image), I'd say that's not bad at all... it looks like you have a white line that is almost a single pixel wide, and doing that with 1-bit graphics really isn't going to get any better. If all they have done is upscale a small image and let 1-pixel blocks increase in size to 4x4 or 6x6 pixels of the same color (i.e., dumb upscaling), that's unacceptable to be called "laser ready".



Steve, in relation to what I posted above, if these are single pixels, there's no way to smooth them out using 1-bit graphics. If you intend to increase the size of such a graphic and keep its scalability, you'll need to vectorize them. The downside to that is when you go really small, it's up to the computer how thin lines get drawn, and it will often look worse than the bitmap you started with.

[Scott Shepherd]

The ad is kind of deceptive. The first bit made me think "oh, they said bitmap, what did you expect" and then later, it says they are ready to resize for your project, which to me, would indicate it's a vector file.

Either way, like you, I'd be disappointed in the products results.

[Stephen Beckham]

Dan, got it... Posted a small section again to show just simple blend tool that smooths out the pixels... No smoke and mirrors here, just blew up the portion so that no one tried to claim that I was posting registered file or copywrited file.

Look at where the arrow is at (upper left of G). You can see that simple editing can smooth out that jagged edge.

I have software from LB that I appreciated - again - the original post was to point out to anyone looking for some quick and cheap graphics - that's what you'll get. I threw this $15 on to an order to make minimums for purchase - then I'd wished I'd put $15 towards some other test material versus the software.

[Frank Corker]

Agreed that it can be cleaned up, but you shouldn't have to do that, it's a very poor graphic. It probably wouldn't show up on anything under 3 inches, but some of the detailing that we have to do could make it disastrous.