Im trying to do something and need some help from you pro’s. I want to make a wood laminate (marquetry) table of my car from a photo I took. That means I need to really dumb it down and posterize it to only a couple of colors. The plan is to get the veneer and cut out the image then another color, do it again etc then put it all together like a puzzle.
I have a generic laser, stock board, and use corellaser. I have photoshop to manipulate the image though and Im pretty good in that.
final effect should be something like this (Some photo I got off the net from google)
Ill post my photo so far in the next comment.
My issue is getting it into corel laser as a decent vector format. No idea. If you look at the front bumperette for example, in my picture, it is too complex for the laser. It would never work. I could probably use photoshop and simplify it but Id really love to find a plug in or process to really posterize it, vectorize it and import it into corel laser to cut.
Any tips greatly appreciated. Otherwise Ill have a lot of kindling this winter.
You might want to try one of the image effects like pen & ink which will make it look like a drawing.
Or (& I know this is sacrilege in a world of CAD software) print it out and do a tracing by hand with a sharpie marker. It’ll let you simplify the design while retaining the basic details. Then scan that in and do an outline trace.
If you have Illustrator, you can use the LiveTrace feature & there are various options (e.g. 6 colours, 16 colours, Shades of Grey, Silhouette, etc) which will then basically posterise & create vector for you.
@Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y I dont really have illustrator. I did for a while, but you might as well explain differential calculus to my goldfish. I just wasnt getting it. Granted I cant say I gave it the college try but it seemed like it would be a steep learning curve. Maybe I should try again? Too bad adobe wants $20/month to play with it though. That kind of hurts.
Corel (at least the X series versions) has a similar feature. You could always pick up an older version on eBay that’s installable (just not the Home & Student version). You still run Corel on your machine and don’t have to pay monthly charges for the privilege.
@Bob_Damato I am fortunate enough to have a subscription for the Adobe suite until sometime in 2017 (then I have to look at whether it is worth me paying for it anymore). I found AI reasonably easy to learn, but I was switching from previous Adobe Fireworks software (which has similar vector editing features) & was very similar to that (except better). But as Jim says, there is a similar feature in Corel Draw, so might be cheaper to go that route. It’s possible (although I don’t know) that there may be a similar feature in Inkscape? Anyone know if LiveTrace exists in Inkscape?
