What am I doing wrong?

[spike]

Hi everyone. This is my first post so I may be awkward. I have had my machine about 3 1/2 weeks and love it.
I have been trying to carve this photo in a 3D with no luck. When it is finished it is almost even with the surrounding surface and you can't make out any features.
I have tyied using depth settings, reverse settings, raise and lower settings with no results. I can't get a better photo as the building was torn down in the early 1970's. The picture is of the high school I graduated from in 1965.

Any help would be welcome.
Spike

[mtylerfl]

Hi everyone. This is my first post so I may be awkward. I have had my machine about 3 1/2 weeks and love it.
I have been trying to carve this photo in a 3D with no luck. When it is finished it is almost even with the surrounding surface and you can't make out any features.
I have tyied using depth settings, reverse settings, raise and lower settings with no results. I can't get a better photo as the building was torn down in the early 1970's. The picture is of the high school I graduated from in 1965.

Any help would be welcome.
Spike

Hello Spike,

Welcome to the Forum!

That photo is a tough one to get a good quality carve from as it is right now.

Aside from re-drawing/tracing and shading it by hand in a drawing program (which is what I would do), you could try experimenting with brightness, contrast, and Highlight/Midtone/Shadow histograms to tweak it a bit in your photo-editing software. Might have to lasso/mask certain areas so you can isolate individual areas of the photo for retouching and editing.

Since the photo has quite an uneven variance of contrast/brightness overall, it might be a challenge to get it so it can yield a decent carve - in wood anyway. I think it would do just fine as a lithopane with a backlight, as is, but I don't think that's what you were asking.

[BobHill]

Spike,

That's one that I personally would take into a vector program (CorelDraw/Illustrator/Xara) and make a line drawing of, then assign your depths at the proper locations (shades of grey fill) before making it into a PNG format for importing into Designer as a PTN file.

Bob

[spike]

Thanks guys. I may have to put this project on the back burner till I get more experiance with what the machine can and can not do.
Spike