Photo transfer to cnc

[Winebrenner (Dan & Kim Winebrenner)]

I have shapeoko 4 xxl and am slowly advancing into new areas and wanting to know if i need software to convert a photo to carbide create 7 i have the photo down loaded but its not working correctly i even turned it into black and white format. Thx danny

[fenrus (Arjan van de Ven)]

there’s different options to do this… but you’re a little light on details

what is your expected outcome?
just a contour? more of a halftone (dot) pattern?
different depths for different colors?

[Winebrenner (Dan & Kim Winebrenner)]

Ive seen a transfer of photo on wood done by laser cutter and i know it can be done with shapeoko i do want to know all options and with dot style and dimensional . thx danny

[fenrus (Arjan van de Ven)]

the dot style is usually called halftoning or dithering… CC itself doesn’t support that natively, but open source software like gimp and inkscape let you process the image. Basically what I do is use either of these to preprocess the image but you could also use something like https://halftone.xoihazard.com/
Then I actually paint the top of my wood black (so that when I cut into it the cutouts become bright spots)… import the halftoned image (as vectors) and then do an advanced vcarve cut.

I’ve also used gimp to do more an outline pattern using gimp to process the photo; the result looks something like this:

this works best with high contrast images to be honest
in this case I cut the pattern with carbide create/motion, filled with black paint and then sanded the excess away

this later is basically a thresholding step in gimp, but after I first ramped up the contrast so I could pick better which parts became black

[Winebrenner (Dan & Kim Winebrenner)]

Thank you so much i really appreciate the response i will give it a go and post my results …i really like my shapeoko one of my best purchases.danny from louisvilke ky

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

For halftones see:

Halftone generator on Cutrocket

This was announced/demoed in a limited way a while back — had occasion to reference it in a support ticket recently, so here’s the text from that: We have a halftone generator which will accept black and white images, so you will need to convert any image into a black and white picture. That is the only type of picture the generator will accept. Help file: https://cutrocket.com/halftonehelp.php

Some photos have sufficient contrast that they can be auto-traced:

Carbide Create - Image Tracing

We just posted CC 520 to: https://carbide3d.com/carbidecreate/download/ 520 includes a big new feature for us, Image Tracing. [image] You should be able to load a JPG or PNG and get a reasonable set of curves from it very quickly. A few caveats: Right now, it’s mono only so color images will be converted to black and white using the thresholds in the window. We’re not optimizing for very small images so some will work well, others won’t. We’d recommend images larger than 500px on a side …

Or, one can just re-draw the photo in its entirety using the Curve tool:

2D Drawing

[ehendrix (Eric Hendrix)]

Halftoner by Jason Dorie Link

This is what I have used in the past. It is a FREE software. The latest version is 1.7 and has not been updated in a while.

It does offer Variations in halftones, Dots, Circles, Wavy lines or even squares, if memory serves me right.

It has been a while since I had used it. Have fun!