first REAL job!

[Phyllis Rhodes]

Well, here it is. My first job. Everybody at work is coming up with all kinds of things for me to laser. The biggest one being my BIG boss who wants me to do ALL the signage for their new eye clinic that has THREE FLOORS! At least I have about 6 months to learn more!

I have an Epilog Helix 45w... came around May 30, so I am still playing with it.

One of my doctors wanted to do something for her husband from their two sons for Fathers Day. I played around with black marble a couple of days ago and started to get worried about the settings. Luckily, I only had to run this one one time to get the settings to what I thought looked good.

And here it is. She scanned the drawings and e-mailed it to me. The easy part was cropping out the sections and positioning it where I wanted it. The hard part was taking "dad" and making him off to get rid of all the extra little pixels (blasted things) that the LASER sees, but that aren't really visible on the screen. Let me know if there is an easier way to do this.

I know my photo-taking skills need work, but what do you expect having taken it at 11pm on a work night.. on the kitchen island... LOL But I was too excited not to take it so I could post it.

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for making it better!

Phyllis
Laser-er-In-Training
:-)

[Shaddy Dedmore]

You might be able to up the contrast to get rid of some. Or you can use the paint fill feature to fill the background white, but up the tolerance so it copies over more shades. Such as, let's say you scanned in a picture with a white background. You Scanner will usually make most of the background solid white, but other parts (usually around corners or letters/pictures) it makes a kind of off white. Might not be able to tell with the naked eye without zooming in on the PC. So, when you paint fill in software, and let's say you chose the color to fill be pure white. THen whatever you click on (in this case, where you click on is also white) it will fill up with pure white. But if the tolerance is set to zero, only the exact original color you clicked on will be turned white, when it runs into the off white, it will leave it alone. If you up the tolerance a little, it will change the color you clicked on, plus a little bit of the shades lighter and darker from it. If you increased the tolerance to 100%, it would fill the whole page pure white. So, by experimenting with contrast and fill, you should be able to get rid of some of the scan imperfections.

If you already made the scan black and white, as opposed to color or greyscale, you'll be stuck just zooming in and editing by hand (which isn't that hard on some things)

Shaddy

[Leigh Costello]

As a prospective laser owner, I think you did great. I did something similar with my sandblaster for a mom whose child had made the cutest mother's day card for her. So cool to make "permanant records" of kids and their masterpieces!