What are the most common softwares used by us Laser engravers ?

[Harry Radaza]

I was just wondering what are the most common softwares that we engravers use (shareware or not) ?

As for me ...

in order-

1) Coreldraw
2) Photoshop
3) Photograv
4) Andromenda Screens Plugin for photoshop
5) Autocad
6) Illustrator
7) Corel Trace


Just was wondering if there was a common denominator. And if there are some good softwares out there that I have not come across of that might be pretty usefull if applied (file archiving, thumbnail viewer, etc.)

So what is yours

[Frank Corker]

Xnview is well worth keeping. Easy to convert to greyscale/size and setting the dpi - http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.html and XnView provided as Freeware for private non-commercial, educational use and non-profit organization.

[James Stokes]

I do most of my photo editing in Photoimpact.

[Joe Pelonio]

I too use:

Coreldraw
Photoshop
Corel Trace

but also use:

Freehand
Gerber Composer
Adobe Streamline

[Darren Null]

Irfanview for image sorting/thumbnails/opening images quickly to see what they are. It's free, and the default image viewer on all my computers because it loads quickly. Not directly to do with lasering, but makes finding and assessing images quickly quite easy.

Photoshop. Andromeda etchtone plugin.
Coreldraw
Real Draw Pro (Mediatone)

[Nancy Laird]

We use CorelDraw X3, Photoshop 7.0, Photograv 7_11, and CorelTrace. Still learning!!

Nancy (91 days)

[Joni Campbell]

I use Corel 12, Corel Trace, Laser Master 8 :) I couldn't live without any of them :)

[Harry Radaza]

thanks for the replies.

Googled up Laser Master 8 and found it to have a NESTING feature. This fits as many objects into 1 area good for high production work such as ours.

I was wondering if there was any plug ins for corel available for this feature.