Vectric Customer

I have a picture of my brothers cat that I want to
engrave on some plexiglass.
I have used paint.net and cropped the picture to the outline
I want. However I can not for the life of me get the white
background trimmed from the outside of the cats face.

I know it can be done, but I'm stumped.

I have photo Vcarve, VcarvePro, Microsoft paint, and
paint.net.
I sure could use a nudge.
Thanks for any help!
olf20 / Bob

In Paint.net the tool you're looking for is the "magic wand" 4th down on left column of tool tray. Here's a very short video on using it.

Thanks Highpockets, I got that far but must be missing a step
afterwards.

Attached is a copy of the picture after paint.net

I need just the cats face.

olf20 / Bob

I'm not sure what your showing me, but the problem is when
I go to engrave the face it engraves a square with the face in
it. I just want the face. Is that a mask?
Hope I'm explaining this right.
Thanks for your replies!!
olf20 / Bob

Try this one. It's in .png format and available as a jpeg if you need it. I used Photoshop. Not sure how it could be done in Paint.net

You need to save in .png format to preserve the transparent background.

Bob, sort if I was confused the issue. The green is just a layer to show the head more clearly with a transparent background. I believe the problem your having is because the background on your photo is white and not transparent. Gerry is also correct, you need to be saving the image in a file format that supports transparency (tif, png ...) . I usually use .png.

Why can't you just use the trace bitmap tool and then use that to tool path inside vectors.

Thanks everyone. I'll try the trace idea. I had thought of that
but thought it could be done in one of the photo programs.
Thanks Gerry for the tip on .png
olf20 / Bob

Not liking the odds of it looking recognizable in plexi, post back your results when able.

+1 to what Doug has said

Just as additional information, not only does jpeg not support transparencies it is really the worst file format to use for this sort of work. It does a good job of compressing files which gives a smaller file size, thats why it is so popular on the internet where file size is quite important BUT in order to get the smaller file size a lot of the colour info is discarded. For viewing on the internet that discarded info is not needed but for printing & work like this that extra info can make all the difference to the final quality

I'll try a cut on Saturday.
Martin - when going to BW does it matter if the full
quality if the color is there?? Just asking as I don't know.
Thanks
olf20 / Bob

I don't have any personal experiences, to be honest I have never converted anything to black & white, if I am converting colour then I have always converted to greyscale, I have never even tried the B&W options in photo editing software out of curiosiy my gut tells me that B&W is not going to give you the best results for something like this.

I tried a couple of attempts on some scrap.
Did not turn out. Funny how my mind thinks of
things that I can not do. LOL
Thanks for the suggestions.
olf20 / Bob