Scanning Detail

[J_Man]

So you can just take a scan and carve it? That would be great. I can go on the net and find a ton of images for things I want to do. I've worked with Photoshop for, well I guess it's been close to 15 years now (time flies). I'm a screen printer and sign maker, so I've been working with graphic programs since around 1987. If making a good carving is depending on how good you can work a graphic's program, this will be great. I guess I'll find out in the weeks to come after I get the machine.

[Jeff_Birt]

Well, you will want to clean up any scan with the pattern editor before carving; much like you would probably touch up a photo before printing.

[badger]

From what Ive learned and Chris can verify, its not just a matter of taking an image hitting grayscale in one of the many software programs and your carve is gonna come out perfect.

It takes alot of work to check out how each of the 255 gray scale colors are going to work. Each of those colors is going to tell the machine at what depth to carve it at. Most of your images will have many shades and not knowing what you are doing will make some of you mad when you see the results.

Thousands upon thousands of pixels are in each image. Blurring and smoothing sometimes help but not all the time. You will see you might lose alot of detail when you do this and thats where knowing how to go into the image and change your scale comes in. Just a couple wrong pixels here or there will give you the spikes you see in your designer. Looks good maybe by just looking at it but when it comes down to the carve thats when you see all the problems.



Not trying to discourage anyone but taking an image off the internet, transferring it to gray scale and upload it into designer will not always give you what you want.

I know Chris can verify that it can take hours to make an image come out the way you want it too. Now if all your looking for is a silhouette of something those can be pretty easy. But there is no harm is asking anyone here and if it wont take too long Id be happy to help anyone out with an image and send it back to ya.

Now dont send me images of the Sistine Chapel and expect me to come up with a perfect pattern

[ChrisAlb]

Now dont send me images of the Sistine Chapel and expect me to come up with a perfect pattern

Aw...come on now badger...where's your sense of ADVENTURE?? LOL

It does take a lot of work and can be VERY time consuming BUT, when you nail it right, all that work seems to fade away...a "little"...lol

Badger is right that just one mis-colored pixel can give you a peak or valley. The thing about "smoothing" is, it's smooth to the eye, NOT the CW. If you have a black line and you 'smooth" it, the smoothing creates "many" more varying shades of gray around the line and thus, the peaks and valleys come in.

The real trick is in knowing your graphics application inside and out so you can save a lot of wasted steps getting there.

[J_Man]

So long as there's actually a way to do something, I'll generally figure out how to work with it. Yeah usually anytime you deal with graphics programs, there's always a level of work to be done to get everything right. That's not a problem though, just a matter of time...

[badger]

Exactly, One big reason some might be confusing errors with the machine and making some comments about it. It takes patience and some just dont have it.

[Kenxxx]

I find that the scanning probe will yield a beautiful pattern with great detail, however, the tip of the probe is considerably smaller than the 1/16" tapered carving cutter. The cutter cannot reproduce the really fine details the probe has detected. Still, the probe is a great asset and I use it frequently. I currently have a scanned project of a relief carving of Santa at his desk and I may have to use a micro gouge and and a micro "v" tool to reach the original detail of beard and hair, but that is a minor step compared to the overall quality and ease of duplicating. We are talking a few 1000's of an inch difference.

[mtylerfl]

I find that the scanning probe will yield a beautiful pattern with great detail, however, the tip of the probe is considerably smaller than the 1/16" tapered carving cutter. The cutter cannot reproduce the really fine details the probe has detected. Still, the probe is a great asset and I use it frequently. I currently have a scanned project of a relief carving of Santa at his desk and I may have to use a micro gouge and and a micro "v" tool to reach the original detail of beard and hair, but that is a minor step compared to the overall quality and ease of duplicating. We are talking a few 1000's of an inch difference.

Hello Kenxxx,

Just curious if you are religiously assigning the Bit Optimization: BEST to your patterns before carving. I have found in every case, that pattern details carve very well if this step is followed. (Provided that the patterns themselves are done well in the first place - there's a lot of poorly done patterns out there.)

An Aside: Awhile back, there was some discussion about the bit optimization settings and a couple folks thought the "best" setting didn't look as good as "none" or some other lower setting on some of their carvings.

That puzzled me, so upon further investigation, I discovered they were carving internet clip art or photos on wood, and I theorize that the "best" setting revealed too much detail - in other words, with low-quality clipart or "noisy" photos, the inherent defects were masked somewhat when a low bit optimization was set.

For carving properly created, true dimensional relief patterns though, it will always yield a much better detailed result to use Bit Optimization: BEST setting on each pattern.

[badger]

I find that the scanning probe will yield a beautiful pattern with great detail, however, the tip of the probe is considerably smaller than the 1/16" tapered carving cutter. The cutter cannot reproduce the really fine details the probe has detected. Still, the probe is a great asset and I use it frequently. I currently have a scanned project of a relief carving of Santa at his desk and I may have to use a micro gouge and and a micro "v" tool to reach the original detail of beard and hair, but that is a minor step compared to the overall quality and ease of duplicating. We are talking a few 1000's of an inch difference.

Have you tried any of the tips? I find it gives a better yield to the pattern making it just the same size as the carving bit plus it works great on some of those delicate items you would be afraid to try it on.

It also gives you just a bit more reach in probing that you can amend later in the designer if it says the pattern is too deep.

[CustomWestCoast]

I am interested in purchasing the scanning probe now that it is on sale. I have one question concerning resizing a scan. Once you scan an object that is 3" x 3", can you enlarge the final scan so that you can carve it larger than the original scanned item such as 10" x 10" or do you have to carve the scanned item at it's orignial size?