This Laser Engraving Software prepares your photos with the click of a
button for laser engraving on any device that supports GCode.
Here is a video of how to use the more expensive Laser Photo Wizard. This product is the same as the GCode Photo Wizard except for the output drivers. An improved video showing the Gcode photo wizard will be comming soon.
* Note: Diode lasers cannot cut clear plexiglass.
The problem with laser photo engraving is that most photos are of such low contrast that they do not engrave well.
Colby dithering helps to fix that. Colby Sketch does fix it but the results do not always look photo realistic.
Smart contrast looks at edges and surrounding areas to compute contrast. This technique has 2 part level and radius.
The level setting determines how strong the effect, the radius setting will determine how wide an area is considered for the background.
You can set these factors with sliders in advanced settings or you can simply use the radio buttons to set the sliders for you.
Radio Buttons (the defult)
|
Sliders (Advanced)
|
No Contrast
|
Mild
|
Strong
|
Very Strong
|
|
GCode Photo Wizard Software Output Methods
|
The Sketch will attempt to look at edges and create a solid sketch of the image.
This is very helpful because it is not only artistic, but lower cost lasers that
do not control their power and position as well still can do a nice rendering on
most materials.
There are sliders that let you control the thickness of the edge and what is white
and black.
Sample Sketch Output on 15w Diode Laser
Floyd-Steinberg Dithering
Floyd-Steinberg is a dithering algorithm. Dithering is converting a grayscale
image to black and white, such that the density of black dots in the new image
approximates the average grey level in the original.
As you can see this does not look very good. That is because the displays
output pixels do not match the converted image.
We can use the preview mode that takes the pure black and white for the laser
output and shows you how it might look on the final output.
You can also show how it might look on the material like wood. The software will
let you change this background image. This is not a perfect representation but
it gives you a good idea of what the final product might look like.
The preview mode does not change the output image only
what is shown on the screen.
Colby Annealing Dithering
The Colby Annealing dithering algorithm was developed for this product by the author, Ken
Colby. Like Floyd-Steinberg it tries to make the density of black dots in the
new image approximate the average grey level in the original. Unlike
Floyd-Steinberg it uses a software technique called Simulated Annealing that tries to arrange the black dots so that they tend to appear near the darker areas. This creates a image with higher contrast but it is less smooth then the Floyd-Steinberg. Because it is using Annealing the software can be told to reduce the number of black dots, this will cause the dots to spread out and help mitigate the effects of dot overlap.
The following output images show the Colby algorithm output but because of the
small size of the images the differences from the Floyd-Steinberg are subtle. The gray image is attempting to deal with overlay so the dots are spread out.
This method, that works well with wood, increases the contrast of the engraved
image buy dithering and also considering the edges of the photo.
The system has an advanced text feature that lets you place text of any color
and font anyplace on the output. Text can be output as bitmap text or vector
text.
Actual output with text:
|
GCode Photo Wizard Software
|
GCode Photo Wizard Pro
o The Full Version supports all 3 conversion methods Sketch, Floyd-Steinberg
Dithering and Colby.
o Vector Cutouts
o Dialogs for Color Balance, Rotation and Scaling are provided.
o With the Full version you can add simple labels.
o Overlays, png files with transparent area can be use to frame the image.
o The Pro System has a robust system for adding text and additional images to
your project.
o Skin Smoothing software make for better portrait output.
o Square, oval, and heart shaped frames can be added
o Lighting effects can be used the enhance the image
o A built in editor will let you clean up images especially in sketch mode.
For more information about the GCode system Click
Here...
GCode Photo Wizards sells for only $49.95 .