"Paint by numbers" inlay work

[Lee DeRaud]

Can the same thing be accomplished in CorelPHOTOPAINT?

I'll assume you're talking about George's "step 2"...

Most programs call it "posterize". Closest thing I could find in PhotoPaint was under Image|Color Mode|Paletted..., select "Optimized" palette, set "Dithering" to "none", and start dialing down the "Colors" spinner. Once you get close you can edit the resulting palette and/or use the Image|Adjust|Replace Colors dialog to adjust or further reduce the number of colors.

One other thing that can drive you crazy is if you resize a bitmap and save it with "Anti-aliasing" checked (same true for exporting bitmaps from CorelDraw). It leaves "fringes" of intermediate colors at color boundaries. Example: that picture George posted looks like it only has 8 or so colors, but it actually has more than 20, most of which never appear as more than a couple isolated pixels at a time. Not fatal, but it makes the CorelTrace settings rather twitchy: if you end up with way more objects in the trace than you expected, that's probably what happened.

[Chuck Burke]

Lee,
I was referring to step 2. So much to learn. sigh......

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Chuck;
I have PhotoPaint but don't use it as I "grew up" as a Photoshop user and really have no inclination to learn another program. I'm sure Photopaint has a great number of plug-ins like Photoshop and something which produces a similar output is available. In PS there are a large number of adjustments to levels, edge accuracy, etc that can change the output quite a bit.(see improved pic below).
The problem with trying to make a portrait inlay (other than a shadow/silhouette) is that its very difficult to find veneers that come close to matching the "final" colors- and trying to find a group of compatible veneer alternatives is pretty tough. I have about 30 or 40 different wood veneers and about a doizen dyed color veneer and it's still tough to get a picture look right. I don't recommend this process as a "make money" use of the laser as it takes a bit of time and patience and not too many people would spend $500 for a wood portrait as that what I figure one would be worth.
George

[Lee DeRaud]

The problem with trying to make a portrait inlay (other than a shadow/silhouette) is that its very difficult to find veneers that come close to matching the "final" colors- and trying to find a group of compatible veneer alternatives is pretty tough. I have about 30 or 40 different wood veneers and about a dozen dyed color veneer and it's still tough to get a picture look right.

It's a little spooky sometimes how much detail you can strip away and still have a recognizable image...but it takes just the right image to start with, and you usually won't know it it really worked until it's done.

I've been using the adhesive-backed veneers from Rockler, mostly to make the assembly process a bit more tractable. (A side benefit of this stuff when cutting a stack of it with a scroll saw is that the adhesive pushed into the saw kerf by the blade helps hold the stack together as you cut.) There are about 8 useful species in that series, and I find myself occasionally staining individual pieces after cutting to get features that don't justify an entire separate color.

I don't recommend this process as a "make money" use of the laser as it takes a bit of time and patience and not too many people would spend $500 for a wood portrait as that what I figure one would be worth.

Roger that, at least for custom portraits. Doing this on a one-off basis makes the laser redundant, because it speeds up the least time-consuming part of the process. I still think it has a place for "production" marquetry, assuming you can leverage multiple copies against the image manipulation...it's a lot like silk-screening in that respect.

Of course, the whole perspective changes if there's a really good reason to do one: the very first one I did was a portrait of my parents for their 50th anniversary.