Removing white background from detailed image

[HalAtkins]

With the purchase of a new laser machine (Thunder Laser), our group is now going to learn to use Lightburn (have been using Corel). With our business, we take an image of a pet’s paw (we’ve edited that image in Pixelmator on and iPad) and engrave that. We need to learn how to take the white background out.

I’ve attached a sample image. Looks like we are supposed to use the Trace Image tool, but we aren’t able to figure that out. Would love some help if anyone has time to help walk us through a proper workflow.

[thelmuth (Tim Helmuth)]

I opened the image and it has a transparent background already.

[ednisley]

@HalAtkins

take the white background out

The PNG image already has a transparent background, so doing it as an Image seems feasible:

Tracing it will convert it to a binary vector drawing, which separates the pads from (most of) the fur:

Getting rid of the last furry bits would require some image editing that isn’t in LightBurn’s wheelhouse. You could do much the same in a raster image editor by thresholding the image, erasing the leftovers, then importing the cleaned result into LightBurn for tracing.

Turning that into a Fill layer looks about right:

Perhaps I misunderstand the goal: are those different from the results you want?

[HalAtkins]

Very thankful for folks helping out!

The end result of what we are looking for is for the engraved paw print to be as photorealistic as possible. Our attempts to trace have resulted in more “cartoon-ish” than “photo-ish”.

[HalAtkins]

Thanks for pointing this out. Going back to what my staff was playing around with, I now see that what they were using in Lightburn were JPG (they are trying to improve the contrast for engraving as well.