New to Forum. Primary focus is carving photo images of portraits/profiles. I've followed many of the steps presented on the forum relative to photographs but when zooming in when in CW Designer the image is distorted with 'blisters' or inverted, with craters. The only reasonable success I've had is having scanned a portrait profile photo of a three year old young girl. Computer is a Compaq Presario 900 w/windows XP. Camera.. a Konica 4mp at high res 1704x2304 quality at Fine, jpg save. Scanner Epson 3170 3200x6400 set at 1200 dpi for color, ~360 for b&w. Have only Adobe Elements and save as gif or png so that I can erase background and carve a portrait image only. I also noticed in Designer when switching to invert and back there is a momentary image for a tenth of a second that is just superb... great resolution & detail. Why is that not available to carve?