removing all the bumps

[AnnetteJ]

Hi all,

I am looking for a system that does smooth carvings from photos. I recently had someone do some pictures for me with their Carve Wright System, and the carvings did not turn out smooth, but, it appears each color/shade is a "wart", a lump, group of lumps, and not smoothly carved. I downloaded the trial Carve Wright software, imported a picture and viewed the bit marks in the finished picture. I don't want bit marks in the final picture. I want it smooth. How is this accomplished?

[DocWheeler]

AnnetteJ,

I've had my machine for two years and what "sold" me on it was being able to pull a photo into designer and see what looked like a carving of the photo. It was only after getting the machine that I found out that I was not seeing the problems in Designer that would show up in the carve.

Two things you will find are that photos have noise and jpgs are particularly bad because the compression techniques it uses creates a lot of Wild pixels.
The second thing is that Designer sees depth by greyscale so that the relative depth of objects in the photo is by color rather than what you would otherwise expect.

Do a search on "jpg" (with the quotes) to get a sense of this.

Some new aspects of designer allow for some smoothing and there are many graphics programs that can be used. Use the search feature here, there is a bunch of information about this.

[RBeau1954]

I have done several carvings using pictures, as was said above, there is alot of noise associated with jpegs, what I do is use a photo program like picture it and convert the picture to a black and white picture and you can play with it in different ways to make it work well in Designer. It is better if you can get the picture as a bitmap because there is more detail but playing around with the picture in a photo program and converting it to black and white first will help.

[AnnetteJ]

Hi guys...thanks for the input. I asked my son which pictures have the less noise and he said to scan your picture and save as a "png". I will do that, and then convert to grayscale before importing into the design.

Thanks a bunch!

Annette

[AnnetteJ]

okay...in case anyone else has a question on this...I want to share a few things that I have learned...take your photo, go into Gimp2 and use the Gaussian Blur...convert into black and white, i.e., grayscale, and then save. Import into CarveWright. Bingo! Smooth skin, hair, and other stuff for photos. If you want to, you can select areas to blur. My son also used the "burn" tool in the Gimp2 program to show me that there is lots of stuff that can be done to smooth the picture.

Today, my SIL showed me that I can buy the software for a couple hundred bucks, and prepare my own files for production. This is also something my son wants to use for gunstocks, so, I guess I am going to keep my Carve Wright guy, Joe, very busy.

A public thanks to Joe who has done such great for us!!!