How to Engrave Photos with your Glowforge for Free

hello Inkscape fur glowforge users today we're actually gonna veer off and do something a little bit different than in ski because some people have been asking about photo editing I know that this is a really really challenging task for some people um and it was very challenging for me at first as well I had so many failed attempts of photos I thought it would just be easy to kind of plug and chug and some of them are but a lot of them especially of people are not quite that easy but with a few simple edits I found that it's a lot easier to kind of work with and so I wanted to go through what I would use today so I don't have Photoshop I don't have anything that you really have to pay for honestly so I try to find a bunch of free resources this one that I use is called pix LR X and so I have a shortcut right here but this is the website pixlr.com slash X and what we are going to do is these are all the different photos I've gotten permission from a friend to use her wedding photo for advertising purposes and so I edit a lot of my photos in this particular software and it does a lot but we'll show how to edit basic photos first so let's just click on our photo here now this is a wedding photo I love professional photos you can do other photos as well but professional photos are by far the best in my opinion so the amazing thing about this software is it can do a lot of the basic things so you can flip it you can resize it you can change the background I don't really mess with this as much lately but yeah I just kind of change in the background there you can layer it if you want to I've done that before when it comes to like coloring book pages which we'll go over and a different software is how to basically create your own coloring book page um you can change the height you could do the cutout you can do all of these different types of things but the thing that I really use for pictures is this little son key now the big thing I always do first is change it to black and white because you're going to be engraving on wood you want to change it to black and white so that way it has a better image and you better know what it's going to look like so here's our black-and-white which i think looks pretty good to start however I'm not really that thrilled with the details on her dress I feel like I can't see them well enough now typically now this photos a little bit different I've messed with it a little bit typically the first thing that I would do is increase the brightness and increase the contrast you see on this photo that does not work because then she kind of disappears so I will actually go back to normal and these different controls really allow you to mess with different things differently on this photo only what I've done for this one is I've actually decreased the exposure here and so that way you can see the details on her dress that way you can see a little bit more of them they're more in focus and then you can mess with all of these other types of features if you want to so if you want to add a little bit more of a black or a little bit more of the white or decrease it or different things like that you can mess with those one of the other things I do sometimes is I sometimes hit the sharpen and you can kind of see in some ways it makes it a little bit more grainy but in other ways that kind of sharpen some of those details that you'll see a little bit more so on your wood engravings so I'm gonna sharpen it a little bit here and then I'll leave a few other things we'll do another photo too and I'll show you guys what both of those look like at the end after the wood engraving so I'm pretty happy with this I feel like they're their images are pretty clear I actually might go back and decrease the exposure just a little bit more for them just a little bit just because I want to try to see some of the details of her dress just a little bit more and have them in focus a little bit more okay now this might not look quite as good on picture as some of the other ones but again we want to make sure that it looks good on wood so after a little while you'll get better at this you'll kind of be able to eyeball it the first view of my photos that I actually kind of edited we're okay and I've gotten better at them as I've gone along so I'm gonna hit save now the amazing thing about this one is it allows you to kind of say how high a quality you want I always put quality to 100 unless you can't for whatever reason I would always do that and then I download it and then from that download I would go to glowforge so after you have your photo you can go into globe for software I will hit upload and then I'll click on my photo and then I will hit open here it'll upload and then I actually just have it cut out by using some of the glowforge software and the other thing that's really cool in here is you can also engrave a message really really easily in the glowforge software as well so it'll take a little bit of time to upload and then it'll show up somewhat like this okay so you can move it around you can resize it I always like to resize it in here so I told her that I would make this an 8 by 10 so I'm going to actually change this to an 8 and then I'll just kind of let that do whatever so it's pretty much an 8 by 10 now this looks kind of weird but that's okay then pick whatever medium you put I always put medium draft board and the thing I always use is medium Baltic birch so that's what I use medium bye meaning like eighth of an inch Baltic birch and then what I do is I click this and it actually goes to draft photo see I thought I was like sure I'll just do HD photo I was a 3d in green food I'll do all these different settings honestly once you edit some draft photo worked perfectly for me so I'm actually gonna stick with draft photo because I really like the way that works for me and what I will now do is to make sure that this actually gets cut out the way that I want to is I'll hit the square and then you can also if you hit this button it will change your aspect ratio you can adjust this however you want to so I like for it to be just a little bit within the picture just so make sure I don't cut out anything but just so the picture goes from edge to edge and then I'll drag that down there we go and I'm pretty happy with that and then I would just make sure that that's on cut which it is and then the photo is good to go so let me show you one other photo that we are going to attempt to edit and then I will show you what that ends up looking like okay so I'll go back here to my home the amazing thing about this is it actually saves a lot of your photos so this is one that I actually recently updated as well and so this is the way that it looked and so the way that I did that is I actually and I'll see if I can go back and do this again but this is what the photo looks like in the end with all the different editing but let's upload that version again so that's me and my husband so if we can find this this was the original photo so let me move that over so if we upload the original photo cool again you have all the different settings that you can work with but the main one you will want is adjust first thing that I will do is I will go to black and white doesn't look too bad but I usually try to increase the brightness a little bit here and again just kind of mess around with the settings a little bit increase the contrast I don't want it to be super high contrast because I want him to be able to see the difference between his pants and the rest of his suit but increase in the contrast is usually really helpful with that so I'm gonna say that that's somewhat where I wanted to be I might sharpen it a little bit etc so let me go back to the original photo and what I ended up editing and then I'll show you guys at the end what I ended up cutting so I'm okay with that that looks pretty good now this is the one that I ended up doing again pretty similar to what I just showed you so let me get this going and then I will show you both photos at the end and how they look so I wanted to show you how the photos turned out so this is the photo that I showed you before that I edited a little bit earlier for this one I also decided to add a little bit of text at the bottom now you will see this kind of has a burning effect you may want that effect if you don't what I would recommend is you cover the area that will be engraved with tape however what I would not commend is covering the photo with tape I engrave on just plain wood so if you're using proof grade materials I I don't like having the masking on them I like taking that off and just engraving on the actual wood I've had most luck like I said with Baltic birch I tried finished walnut plywood did not work very well the faces kind of came off I've tried draft board and that works okay but I really really like the 1/8 Baltic birch the best and I was pretty happy with the way that this photo turned out so I have it kind of zoomed in a little bit so you guys can see the details but this photo I was super happy with so this photo turned out well now you will see that there is almost like a crack and something here there are irregularities in the wood that's just gonna happen but overall I was really happy with how this turned out I love how you can see the wood grain some of your customers may not like that but that's one of the things that I actually really really like in some of the different details that I wanted to show you guys from different angles and again this is all just engraved on wood now if you look very very closely you can see kind of like dots so that's basically how it creates the full complete image but overall I was really happy with the way that this one turned out again just completely engraved on a piece of wood this one was an 8 by 10 approximately and it's with a little under an hour this one was closer to more of a 5 by 7 and it took about 35 minutes and I have the basic so if you would have anything or want to get anything that's a lot quicker I know the pro I think does three times engraving and the plus is two times engraving so you can get these done a lot quicker but for my purposes this is great so I was really really happy with how this turned out like I said I would not use any kind of masking on the pictures they don't then turn out quite the way that I want to and this lighting isn't amazing this is lighting and that's just kind of in the hallway of my house so these pictures actually do look better in person but I don't have a lighting box or anything yet so I plan to get one of those next so thank you so much for tuning in if you have any questions about anything feel free to leave it in the comments I also have the Facebook group if you're watching this on YouTube that you can join and think skate for glowforge users and then if you have not gotten the glowforge yet but you want to buy one if you would love to use my code I would love for you to use it it'll save you 100 to 500 dollars and that is also listed in the comments so thank you so much and I hope you have a great evening and I hope some of these tricks helps you

Channel: Teacher&Maker

Views: 29,790

Keywords: Glowforge, Why to Buy a Glowforge, Free Photo Editing, Free Photo Editing for Glowforge, Photographs in Glowforge, Why I love Glowforge

Id: 7l7QJIB_YFM

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020