file prep howto

[Doug Fennell]

I could use a little help with this one.....

Customer wants this engraved as part of a plaque for a sponsored show - how can I get rid of the white background? This is the actual file I have to use :-(

[Darren Null]

http://laser-etching.com/bg_gone.gif
Background is invisible.

[Gary Hair]

Money is the only thing that will remove that background. That is what I would tell your client - I bet they find you the individual images that they used to put that together - somebody had them to create that image, they must still be available. The other options would be to edit out the white but that would be very time consuming, or you could have a vector conversion service do it for you - William Desrochers does an amazing job of that.
William Desrochers
Excalibur Creations & Recognition
Email: info@excaliburcreations.com (info@excaliburcreations.com)
Website: http://www.excaliburcreations.com (http://www.excaliburcreations.com)


Good luck!

Gary

[Richard Rumancik]

Doug, could you explain a bit more about what you are trying to achieve? If you are trying to engrave this as it is, then why do you need to remove the white background? Or did you need to separate the logos around and reposition them? It is not clear to me why the white would cause a problem with laser engraving.

Are you satisfied that you have enough pixels in the file? You have 980 x 653. First step is to save it as a tif. If you want to engrave at 300 dpi then you need to resample it to 300 and which would reduce the size to 24% scale. This would give you an image about 3.26" x 2.17". Is that large enough for the plaque? You could use a lower dpi but it may look ragged.

If size is okay, then I would follow the resample operation with a "convert to greyscale", then probably adjust tone. (Lighten up the darker logos and burn the lighter ones). Then convert to b/w using Stuki or similar. You may have to play with the slider. Import into CorelDraw and set up your laser image. At this point it will probably look bad on the screen but if you actually try to engrave it it will not be as bad as it looks. Record all your settings and save intermediate files so you know what you did and can backtrack if needed.

If you elaborate we may be able to provide better help . . .

[Doug Fennell]

Richard, It's being engraved on black marble, so the white background has to go. The plaques are 5x7 and 8x10, for 1st and 2nd place trophies in 11 diffrent classes in a car show. This portion of the plaque is the lower half and is basically just a sponsor list.

I ended up using fluid mask in photoshop, and it did a good job. Just went and manualy cleaned up the leftovers and manually redid some of the typesetting.

Washed it through photograve 3.0 and the end result looks good.

[Doug Fennell]

Gary, it's a rush deal and they've run out of time and they're about to have egg on their face. I agree, there must be high quality vectors of this artwork, but they'll never be able to provide it by their deadline.

I made them a list of what is needed for next time.

On a good note, the images cleaned up OK (for the most part) and they like the end result and didn't mind paying for the time.

[Jerry Hay]

Whenever I have done logos I never have worried about white. On my machine white does not laser and all the shades of gray and black do. In my opinion removing the white is a step you can skip and save time and time is money.

[Rodne Gold]

Sometimes the white in a jpeg is not white and when engraving it , you get a speckled effect , happens plenty when we digitally print onto white vinyl , whats supposed to be white in the jpeg has a colour cast.