Format Incredible AI GRAPHICS For Laser Engraving

all right step one crafting your prompt first we're going to create a simple graphic this is the type of graphic you'd commonly use in laser engraving it looks like this or this or this often defined by just one color and kind of has a clip art feel to it the prompt I'm looking for is a tiger wearing a crown now let me explain the rest of these keyword parameters unfortunately for us these AI programs often default to highly detailed graphic results but we want something really simple so we have to use these keywords to hopefully strip down the graphic keyword parameters I'm using to do that are vector logo style line art flat design simple high contrast black and white and for my negative parameters the things I don't want to see in the image I use dash dash no and then background texture gradient gray after hitting enter here are the four options that mid Journey presented me with as you can see my keyword parameters really help to get a nice flat black and white image there's really no color detail in any of these there's a little bit of gray in some of these options there's a little bit of gray up in the crown here but this is easy to remove in our next step I'm going to choose option number one this is the closest to what I was looking for I'm going to upscale this and download it step two time to vectorize this graphic and I'm going to show you how to do this with a free option as well as a paid option anytime we're working with the simple Graphics just the one color flat black and white no color no texture no gradients we're going to want to convert these to a vector so we have an endlessly scalable graphic file that doesn't degrade in quality and also because it is the preferred file format of basically every laser engraving software for the free option we're going to use this website called vectorizer.ai This is honestly the best vectorizer AI software I've ever come across and I use this even over the paid tools that I have so you want to go ahead and upload the graphic you created in AI it'll take a minute to run its process and do the vectorization when it's finished it's going to give you a side-by-side comparison with the original on the left and the vectorized result on the right this is a really good result I really can't even tell the difference between these two so I'm going to go ahead and download my new SVG file so now I have my vectorize SVG file open in illustrator and this is where you'd have to do a little bit of cleanup work depending on how well your prompt came out like I mentioned I'm really only looking for black and white so there are little pieces of gray throughout the image that I have to get rid of so whether you're doing this in illustrator or directly in your laser engraving software it doesn't matter but you'd want to go ahead and just sort through this image and remove all the details that you don't want so you just have the black and the white and after a couple minutes of cleanup work I have the black graphic that I'm looking for now this is an endlessly scalable Vector file that I can import directly to my laser engraver the pros and the cons of the free vectorizer software are the pro it's free and the cons you might have to do a little bit of cleanup work once you're done for the paid vectorizing option I'm going to be using image Trace in Adobe Illustrator to use it I'm just going to select my image file then go to object image trace and then make as you can see it basically cleared out all the gray in one shot and it changed the preset to black and white logo just in case it does anything I don't think it does and if you're not exactly happy with the results you can go into the advanced panel and mess with the paths you can add more paths add the amount of Corners you can add or reduce the noise I like to add the noise so I put it down to about one pixel I then click ignore white just to get rid of the background and then once it's how you like it you can go ahead and click expand and now you have your vector file ready to go it's often a little bit quicker process than the free vectorizer software you don't have to do as much cleanup work but again this is something that you have to pay for now this image is ready to go into your laser engraver so let me show you a quick example of a laser engraving I did using this image on a piece of wood [Music] [Music] but what if you want to do more than just a simple black and white graphic you want to laser engrave one of these awesome designs that you can make with AI you can laser engrave these images it's just a little bit of a different process instead of vectorizing the graphic we're going to create what's called a dithered bitmap let's use this graphic as an example the problem with vectorization is it doesn't handle a lot of detail a lot of fine gradients a lot of texture and colors very well if I were to run this image here through the vectorizer.ai software this is what it looks like on the left is the original and on the right is the vectorized result if we zoom in here you can see that the vectorization process just kind of turns the image into a puddle of Grays and Browns and blacks and that just tells us it's not the right tool for preserving detail in this image when we want to engrave it so for my complex image example my prompt is a frog wearing a top hat in a forest Lord of the Rings style highly detailed high contrast I don't know if those two things go together but the results look pretty funny here are the four options that presented me I'm going to go with the third one here so I'm going to request an upscale of the Third and here is my upscaled image I'm going to download this and we'll move on to the next step I opened this up in Photoshop so we can talk about image size and resolution for a second when you download your graphic from mid-journey it's going to come out at 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels at 72 DPI and if we convert that to inches because that's usually more useful when you're laser engraving it's about 14 inches by 14 inches at 72 DPI I don't want to get two in the Weeds about DPI and laser engraving in this video but let's just say 72 DPI is far too low for what I want to do I want this number to be about 300 and the problem is if I were to just keep this as is and change this number to 300 it will change the resolution to 300 but it's going to make everything just look really bad as you can see on the left here so the proper way to increase the DPI would be to uncheck resample and then change this number to the number you want like I mentioned I want 300. when I change that number to 300 it shrank the image down from 14 to about 3.4 now that's completely fine if the max size you want to engrave is 3.4 you can go ahead and go to the next step however I want to do a slightly larger image so it seems like we're kind of at an impasse so to give myself some more wiggle room with increasing the DPI I want to upscale this image using another free AI program the upscaling AI I'm going to be using is called upscale.media and you can use this for free as of now our AI upscaling is complete our new size is now 4096 by 4096 I chose upscale 4X if I could choose any higher I would but you had to pay for it and then I clicked enhanced quality I don't know exactly what that does but of course I want an enhanced quality and you can see this side by side when you hover over basically the AI takes the image and refactors it to a larger size that way I have more room to increase the DPI checking out our new upscaled image look at the new size now it's 56 inches by 56 inches at 72 resolution when I input 300 DPI it changed my width and my height down to 13.6 by 13.6 and that is plenty of space I'm going to end up going smaller than that so I'm going to click ok and now I have my image set at 300 DPI a higher DPI will mean more detail in the laser engraving however there are limits to how high a DPI your laser engraver can complete so you want to make sure to try to find a balance between increasing it too high it doesn't make sense to go to like 900 DPI when the functional range of your laser is only like 318 DPI to dither our image today I'm going to be using the free version of the imager software if you're not familiar with dithering basically what's going to happen is this software is going to take our image and then it's going to convert it all to black and white dots I just uploaded my photo and you can see already the software has converted it to a black and white image I don't need to do any cropping so I'm going to move right on to the resize currently this image is sized at 13.65 by 13.65 at 300 DPI I want to change this down to about 5 inches so my engraving will be 5x5 300 DPI resize you'll see two images the left is your original and the right is your image that you're editing getting a good engraving on a desert bitmap image like this takes a lot of playing with the settings but I'm just going to kind of run with a little bit of brightness and just add a little bit of sharpening next it's time to choose our dithering profile you're going to click on material and then you have a couple options here I'm going to be using the Norton method because I'm going to be using my otor laser Master 3 which is a diode laser and this says mostly used on diode lasers and I'm going to be doing it on a piece of wood so I'm going to choose the Norton wood method now you can see your design has been converted into a black and white dithered image and you can download it and import into your laser engraving software I'm going to download it as a bitmap but PNG is also fine I just ran the file we created on the same piece of wood as the previous example and kind of struck out like I mentioned earlier when you're working with image engraving you really have to tweak your settings to get a nice image so instead I ran the same file on a piece of scratch paper just so I could show you some of the detail in the Engraving in summary if you're using AI to generate a simple flat one color logo you're going to want to make sure that you add keywords to your prompt that emphasize Simplicity once you have a Graphic that you're happy with you're going to vectorize it and it is now ready for laser engraving if you're using AI to generate a complex image something that's photorealistic or highly detailed you are much less limited to the keywords you have to add to your prompt you can go crazy once you get a graphic that you're happy with you want to upscale it as large as you can using either a free or paid upscaling AI program that will allow you to increase the DPI without sacrificing quality and the final step will be to dither your image either using imagar lightburn image modes or one of the Myriad of other image tethering softwares out there from there you are ready to laser engrave

Channel: Justin Laser

Views: 55,753

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Id: 6EKun3UyuuI

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023