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