Laser Cut Design

This project was to design whatever I want with a Photoshop to cut it out with a laser cutter In an acrylic board. It was my first time using Photoshop. The Photoshop I use is Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 bit). At first I had no idea what to do. I came up with an idea putting bunch of random stuffs that I like. Before I start my project, I decided to use 3 colors, which are black, red, and white. Black means cutting all the way through. Red means burning a little bit. White means nothing, the laser cutter will not cut anything in white.

First I looked up my name because I thought that name is the most important thing that represents me. I looked up 'Seung Yeob' in the internet, but as expected nothing that I wanted show up. What I wanted was my name written in fancy writing style. So I looked up my english name 'Jim' and many pictures showed up with different writing style. I chose a picture that looked the coolest (for me) and pasted to my photoshop. I realized that the picture was already in black in white so I didn't had to touch anything for the laser cutter to work.

I thought of something I like and I thought of a maze. I like solving maze so the maze was good enough to go in to my laser cut design. I searched up for maze in google image. A lot of maze was shown. There was really complicated maze and there was also really easy maze. I do not like a maze that is too hard or too easy, so I chose a maze that wasn't too hard or easy. The maze was very easy to edit because most of the maze was designed in white back ground and black lines. So I just copy pasted and moved it to the top left corner.

I searched up for South Korea flag because Korea is my Home country. When I searched up there was many picture of flags, but the flag I wanted was a flat flag. So I looked for the flat flag (look at the photo above). I copy pasted and moved it to the middle.

I realized that Korean flag has a blue color in it. I had to change the color blue because the laser cutter would not insist blue. As I said before, it only indicates the color black, red, and white. I used the magic wand. Magic wand is a tool in Photoshop that selects image by photo. So if I use the magic wand and click on the blue, it selects everything in blue. It only selects blue that is connected, if there is another color between the blue, the magic wand does not indicate the other blue. By using magic wand I selected blue and changed the color into black. I thought that the design looked a bit empty so I quickly searched up for my favorite game 'super smash bros'. I found an image of the cover page of the game, but I thought that I am not so prepared to edit something like the cover page of the game. I had to give up, but suddenly the logo of the game got in my mind. I copy pasted the logo of the game.

I noticed that the circle in the flag would be cut out because the outline of the circle is painted in black. I did not want the circle to fall out because it wouldn't be the Korean flag if the circle is cut out without any line that divides the middle. Using the magic wand I painted everything into white, except outline, so that it is easier to see.

I had to change the outline of the circle into either white or red so that it does not get cut out. I used the magic wand to select the outline of the circle but it did not work. The quality of the picture wasn't good enough because there was many white colors placed in the middle of the outline. I couldn't select the outline with the magic wand. I struggled a little bit, and then I found an idea that would select the outline of the circle. I used the magic wand to select inside of the circle and then I clicked on the right click and selected 'select inverse'. select inverse selects everything without something that I select. With this I could paint the outline in to red. I also noticed that my game logo and the letter 'J' from my name would be cut out since the background is black and there is nothing the holds the object. I colored the back ground of the game log into white. I could not change the color to my name so I added white square that prevents the letter cutting out.