Using a laser cutter to create a portrait from a photo using vector lines (not rastering).

Supplies

1/8" birch plywood (12" x 12")

Laser engraver / cutter

Sandpaper

Step 1: Find a High Quality Photo You Want to Engrave.

Identify a high quality (> 300 KB) photo (this is a photo of Martin Gardner). I find that portraits with even lighting and good contrast work best.

Step 2: Prep Your Photo With Pixlr

Pixlr - crop, remove background, sharpen, and increase contrast. Brighten until about 1/3 of the picture is “white”. JPG.

Step 3: Additonal Prep Using BeFunky

I use BeFunky Digital Art Oil Painting DLX filter to increase contrast and detail. Take screenshot unless you have purchased the software.

Step 4: Convert to Line Drawing Using Sketchmee

Sketchmee Pro (purchased on MacOS, can also use the iOS iphone app but has less features) - I like using 3 layers with high detail. Save as PDF - transparent. More detail or layers than this will create too many objects for the laser cutter buffer.

Step 5: Prepare File Using Inkscape

Import PDF to Inkscape. The file from Sketchmee will have layers stacked with the top being most dark. Set Inkscape Edit/Preferences/Behavior/Steps to 8 inches so that “arrow keys” allow easy movement of layers. Color map to 3 colors (I use RGB green/magenta/yellow for dark/medium/light). I also set to uniform line thickness of 1 px.

Step 6: Print on Laser

I then save as PDF and import to Corel for laser printing. Convert all lines to “hairline”. Color map settings are below for my laser cutter (Epilog mini 40w). I group objects by color in separate layers and print each layer separately (lower power layers to higher). I recommend this layering step in order to reduce the number of objects sent to the cutter as I have had print jobs error due to memory overload. The total print time for this portrait takes about 70 minutes on this machine.