Laser College

[Kim Holliday]

Laser College
Class #301 Importing Logos and Clipart


One of the most exciting elements to laser engraving is the ability to bring graphics into the program. While there are hundreds of ways to go about this, I will be focusing on some tried and true methods that take away a lot of the guess work. Likely you are a retail store employee or owner and there is simply far too much to do in a given day to tie up hours working on graphics.

Before we begin let’s discuss a few terms. There are essentially two kinds of art, Raster Art and Vector Art.

Raster Art is pixilated. That means if you were to snap a photo with your digital camera and blow it up on your computer screen it would eventually get all out of focus as you zoom in. The edges will look increasingly like little squares.

Vector Art is different. We all colored dot to dot books while growing up. You would draw a line from dot one to dot two to dot three and so on. When finished you color inside those lines to make the picture. Vector Art is a lot like this. It is made up of lines and nodes. And these shapes can be filled in with color.

When a customer asks for you to add a logo to something, begin by asking for an EPS version of that logo in black and white. When I say black and white, this is not to be confused with grayscale. The laser either burns or it does not burn. There is no burning in color and engraving in grayscale may not turn out ok.

Again there are many ways to engrave art. There are settings to help engrave photographs even. Personally I spent well over an hour working on a photograph for engraving. That kind of time makes it hard to bill out a gift item at a reasonable price. In this lesson we are focusing on tried and true. We will spend a matter of a couple minutes setting up the art, importing it, making a couple of tweaks, and engraving. That’s it.

What follows is a video of the Laser University seminar on importing logos – condensed to 10 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/v/9OwveiFCM0k...feature=player

[Kim Holliday]

Laser College
Class #302 Using the Vector Tray


There is nothing quite like making your own product. With the vector tray you can purchase raw material from P. Graham Dunn and cut out your own designs. You may use the vector tray to engrave magnets, pocket coins, name badges, bookmarks, price tags, promotional items, Christmas ornaments, and much much more. The process is not very difficult to learn, but requires you to understand what vectoring is and how to instruct the laser to operate in that way.



Most of the engraving you have likely done in the laser program has been raster engraving. Rastering is when the laser moves back and forth across the material or item it is engraving on and fires off the laser to burn little dots at a time. Imagine that instead of an ink jet printer that makes fine little dots of ink with every pass, you are using a laser to burn those dots. A laser can operate in another way as well in which it follows the contour of an object. This is called vectoring. With the laser running you can vector cut most any shape. With the red light on, you can use the vectoring process to "draw" an outline with the laser light. Other machines that vector include plotters, matte cutters, and vinyl cutters to name a few.


Vectoring on a laser requires that you use a Vector Tray to lift the material off your laser bed. There are a number of vector trays available for purchase. Gravograph makes a tray that is very durable and holds the material against adjustable rulers. This tray is about $500. P. Graham Dunn offers a tray in the laser program that is less durable and has no rulers to line up against, but is about $100 in cost.




Basic Vectoring Demo Video
This video shows you how to make a vector file for laser engraving on Alder (wood). The instructions start form a blank file. Further down on this tutorial page you will find links to various project files that already have the settings saved.

http://www.youtube.com/v/eAC0l50ooQM...&feature=playe