Help Please

[Gail LaPorte]

Hi I am trying to engrave this on glass ( It's blue) so it will engrave white.I have tried to make it into vector with no luck :) And as everyone here knows it due Friday.
Thanks Penny

[Darren Null]

You're probably out of luck with it the way it is- the bright highlight to deep shadow just defies vectorisation.

You could:
1) Redraw it
2) Dither it as is with photograv or similar
3) Try to find a blank vector police badge and just draw in the Maine bits.

[Steve Clarkson]

Gail,

I ran it through X5 Power Trace and saved it in v10......I thought it came out great.....I TOLD you guys the trace function in X5 was alot better than X4!!!!

[Darren Null]

This is all I have. Size as in the original CDR; dropped dpi from 300 to 150 (because it's glass). Serious unsharp mask, then Etchtone. Should engrave, with a bit of luck. I forgot to invert it though...

That is better than X4 Steve.

Also attached is a BMP in the zip dithered with a top-secret method.

[Larry Bratton]

Here's a Photograv file. I did a couple of things to it in Photoshop. Maybe you will get one out of all of these. Glass is cheap, so you can try a couple. This one is inverted. No promises but I tried. Be sure not to resize it.

[Gail LaPorte]

I will try again with the glass I have tried every thing but hand drawing it.I am so thankful for the creek and everyone that has helped me a lot of times.
Thanks
Penny

[Gail LaPorte]

I still cant get it to look like any thing maybe I will try to hand draw it so its a line art.
Thanks
Penny

[Andrea Weissenseel]

dropped dpi from 300 to 150 (because it's glass)

Darren, I wonder about the 150 dpi - is that because it's dithered ? I engrave glass with 600 dpi (when rastering text on it)

Andrea

[Darren Null]

That is because it's dithered, yes. When you're doing text or large black areas, you're overburning at 600 dpi, so you end up with better edges, because your dots are overlapping.

Some materials can cope with 300dpi for dithered images- those materials like acrylic where you just get a cylindrical-ish hole per dot. With glass, you get a conical chip per dot; which necessarily drops the dpi because your dots are bigger...as it's a dithered image you have to make the image up from discrete dots or it won't work.

@Gail- I thought you'd probably end up redrawing it.

[Gail LaPorte]

Id even take a line drawing of it I am having no luck with trying to redraw it by hand?
Thanks
Penny

[Darren Null]

Did you have a go with the graphics from either myself or Larry Bratton? If you did, did you resize the images? Because when you're prepping images for a laser, you cannot resize them once dithered. If that's the case, let me know the precise size you want your image to be and I'll prepare a burn file for you.

OR

To redraw, change the image to a bitmap in coreldraw; up the brightness so it fades and you end up with a 'ghost image'; and then recreate the image over the top using squares, circles and the line tool.

The fact that your image fades from white to almost black in the same 'ring' precludes pretty well all of the easy ways of doing things.