Your work looks great. It looks like you have the basic process of scanning, scaling, dithering, and lasering down. Very good.
There are many ways of doing the masking. There are some choices that are aesthetic and some based on what software you use. It helps if you can keep the masking seperate from the image so that you can go back and tweak the mask later if you want to.
Aesthetically some images seem to look better without masking, or with the masking going to full laser strength so the shape of the image becomes a sort of frame for the contents. This can be true with some rectangular images, and also for creating shapes like a heart with faces in it.
When doing substrates that require negative images, like dark stone, dark aluminum, and acrylic, you need the background to drop out to black on the original image. There are many ways to do that.
- simplest is to use a black brush tool and simply paint out the background. Drawback is it's not editable afterwards.
- using a similar technique but using a layer above the image layer you can paint black on that upper layer and it covers the image with black where needed but since it isn't painted on the image layer it can be modified at any time
- Many paint programs can create "clipping masks". These can sometimes be just another image layer you paint on and it determines the opacity of the image layer. Or it can be a vector layer that cuts out a shape. Vector masks are nice since they draw a line around the image and you use the handles at points on the line to adjust the shape and make it match the image.
- Corel has it's own variation of a clipping mask built in, called PowerClip that you can use to apply a vector shape to a bitmap image and cut out the image using that shape.
One advantage of painting black on an upper layer over using vector shapes is that you can adjust the size and opacity of the brush you use to create gentle vignettes in irregular shapes and with varying sharpness of the edges at different points around the image.
Another thing to think about, in cases where the background vignettes, or where you create a shape around an image and some of the background of the image is still showing. You can use the blur tool in a paint program to blur the background behind the figures so details in the background are not so noticeable. |