Since then, our small company has been operating successfully for many years with already a number of long-term clients, and we are immensely grateful to them for their trust. We hope that we have reciprocated in the right way with quality work, reasonable prices and responsibility. A good reputation is heard far and wide, so the group of companies we work for expands every year. Almost everyone who sent us an order once continued to use our services. Once again, thank you so much for your business and trust.

However, this practice has become unsustainable. The growth in number of new customers has led to the fact that we are constantly overwhelmed with orders that, at the moment, we can barely deliver on time. Also, the increase in the workload of most of our clients is obvious, which contributes to all of it and it is something we didn’t count on. So, for example, at this moment, the delivery time for the order received today is 8+ days.

This tempo has been going on for months and, as all this found us unprepared, we started doing what we never dreamed we would do – literally reject new clients and cooperation of any kind. It is very unfriendly and unprofessional, but at the moment we are simply forced to do it. In July we turned down three companies – two from the States and one from Ireland. We are both angry and sad about it, but it would be completely frivolous to start a collaboration that we know will not go very smoothly.

Our team consists of a graphic artist and a coordinator. We are very serious about the quality of our work and every single portrait we deal with is processed up to 2-3 hours, in order to get the best possible result. We thought that we would be able to meet all the obligations on our own, and when we realized that we had to include someone else, we encountered a problem. It turned out to be impossible to find a graphic artist who is maximally responsible, who would work for the same price as we do, and whose quality of work, at the same time, is equal to ours, which is the most important thing at the end of the day. All this is also the reason why we do not outsource the work to third parties – we want to provide the best possible quality and to stand proudly behind our work.

So, we have decided to create a graphic artist out of scratch. Our new associate Vanja will be a valuable member of our community in the foreseeable future, but, still, it takes a lot of time and effort to get such a quality associate, which we insist on.

In the meantime, we will continue to do our work the best and fastest we can for our regular customers. I hope that the delivery time you are used to will not be extended, and if it does happen, we will definitely announce it regularly and I hope that you will be able to understand this.

To illustrate what kind of busyness we are dealing with, here’s a few recent examples… We work up to 17 hours every day, I couldn’t see my parents this week, my friend’s father passed away and I couldn’t attend the funeral, we had to work two Sundays in a row, there are some errors on our website that we can’t find time to fix, etc. Even the time spent writing this post is a real problem for me, because every hour is precious. All this drives me crazy; I feel embarrassed and angry at the same time. However, the company’s policy has always been that the delivery time, specified by ourselves by the way, must be met.

I have to mention that recently we have had many inquiries for the preparation of various scenes, engraving applications, map restorations, etc. We specialize in portrait editing and we only do portrait restoration and retouching. We really try to avoid everything except that, especially lately.

For all of the customers who need such services, or services that we normally offer, but cannot accept at the moment, you can contact the following artists/ companies:

• Charlie Martin
• Cameron Moore at Memorial Designer
• Andrey Larinov at Impact Etching
• Richard Hagen
• Art Miso graviranje fotokeramika

Of course, we cannot and do not want to provide guarantee for the quality of their work, but these are well-known names who have been working successfully in the industry for many years, some much longer than us.

I hope that we will find a way to overcome everything in the right way.

Stay safe and have a great week.

The post Demanding times appeared first on Memorial Pic.

First of all, we did not intend to prepare such a shop at all, but the need for it occurred as a result of certain circumstances. We figured that we do not need a web shop at all. Why? Well, 90% of our work is preparing portraits for laser etching / ceramic pictures and recently we’ve got involved in glass art etching. Portraits, usually from not very good photos, are quite demanding for processing and each of them is a challenge and in order to get the most sophisticated portrait for headstones, each of them takes us up to several hours of work. This is what we love to do and want to do it, as well as the fact that we’re really good at it. When it comes to various other applications such as birds, flowers, religious motifs, etc. with almost every such order, we are regularly asked if we already have something similar. That’s why we decided, with the encouragement of some of our clients, to start a shop that will contain such things. Clients will not wait for processing and we will be able to devote most of their attention for far more demanding portraits. Practically a win win situation.

How to make an online shop with digital files?

We’ve created our website by ourselves, so we’ve decided to try to make a web shop on our own, too. We’ve used an open source software, which we’ve implemented on the existing WP platform, all free of charge. But what was not free, or rather, what was not worth it, it’s a matter of time spent on detecting, identifying and removing various problems, on a website and on the server that came one after another. Some were serious (functionality and security) and others were harmless (design and user experience) and they all nearly drove us to madness. After all, we managed to create a safe, nice and functional online shop with laser / impact etching items, and we also learned something.

The beginning

At the moment, we only have a couple of files ready for purchase in the shop. We’ve tried to make each one of them flawless, so we needed a certain amount of time to spend on their preparation and we would surely not be putting them up into the shop like on the treadmill. Nevertheless, this is not our priority. What is important is that the shop has been tested, it has a secure encryption, so your data is practically impossible to steal and, theoretically, there should not be any problems. If problems occur, please contact us immediately so that we can solve all the problems.

Items

The items we will put up into the shop are the ones related to the headstone picture industry. With every purchase you will be able to choose an option where you can suggest what would like to be available in the shop. In this way we will offer only useful and of course quality items. Feel free to give us a direct message or leave a comment to suggest which items are considered useful and they will soon be available in the shop. At the moment, we only have laser etching items, but who knows, maybe we’ll expand the offer in time. More about it soon. Also, from time to time we will publish completely free items! Some of them may be slightly lower quality than the others, but they will certainly be quite usable. We will try to insert new items at least once a week, but it will depend on the free time we have.

Copyright

All of the items that will be available in the shop will be prepared only using one or mostly a combination of the following photos:

• Our own pictures
• Pictures our clients sent us with permission for use/ reuse
• Pictures from the net we asked and got permission to use
• Pictures with a Creative Commons license
• Pictures offered in the public domain
• Pictures labeled as free to reuse with modification
• Pictures bought from third parties
• Pictures from websites which provide copyright-free images
• Pictures with clear permission for use, reuse

We take copyright very seriously and we will try to keep every item 100% clean and clear. As we said, this shop was not necessary to us and the last thing we really need are legal problems. However, if you notice that an item violates someone’s rights, please inform us immediately so that we can adjudicate on this matter. We guarantee that we will not use the image that is not even mentioned above, but we cannot guarantee that we have not received or purchased a copy image, or even that Google has mistakenly created the image as free to use for commercial purposes (which happened once a few years ago!).

Price range

We will always try to have reasonable prices for which you get what you really need or want. We have a good reputation about the price/quality balance of our services, and our intention is to continue this with our web shop. Also, we will have holidays discounts on quantity, but now we really do not have time to think about it and do something additional about it.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below or contact us on a well-known email.

Aurora and Alen

Memorial Pic

The post Now available – Web Shop appeared first on Memorial Pic.

Our clients however should not notice any kind of significant change because, as usual, when we receive the order we immediately inform you about the exact delivery time, so you can still rely on us.

Anyhow, we use the opportunity to share this picture of St. Anthony of Padua, prepared for laser etching. St. Anthony is considered to be a patron saint of lost items, lost people, lost souls, travelers .. It’s a nice religious motif to be included in a headstone design

The picture is 40cm in height, at 300dpi resolution.

This file is completely free.

[contact-form-7]

The post FREE – St. Anthony of Padua, preparation for etching appeared first on Memorial Pic.

Most of our partners we cooperate with gets the pictures from their clients which are then forwarded to us for processing. These pictures are usually quality photographs because, of course, families want a good memorial photo. However, while scanning / cropping photos, with at least 50% of the cases easily avoidable mistakes are made. This post is intended for everyone making these mistakes. All of you who don’t make these mistakes already know that this doesn’t apply to you.

How to properly scan a portrait / photo?

The following lines apply to every photo scanning or cropping that will be sent for further editing and processing. If we follow these simple steps, we will surely get a better picture, a better-quality product, and all of it in a short period of time.

Photo scanning

While scanning a photo, make sure that the surface of the glass on which the photo is placed is clean. Even the tiniest grains of dust can cause an unpleasant stain on the face that does not actually exist in the photo. The same goes for hair, grease, and scratches on the glass. It’s enough to gently brush the glass surface several times until you are sure it’s really clean. After scanning, make sure that the scanned digital image is really as clean as the original photo. It is desirable to do this with each new scan. Also, always remove all the filters and effects on the scanner that may have stayed on from the previous scan.

Cropping the portrait

The photograph being scanned is usually much smaller than the surface of the scanner. However, people occasionally find it necessary to scan the entire scanner’s working area. This, of course, is not necessary. In order to save time and space on the disk, and get better quality at the same time, just crop the photo ONLY. When it is necessary to process the entire photograph, e.g. landscape, only photograph is sufficient, there is absolutely no need to send us all the blank space around the photo, or the entire surface of the scanner.

The main part of our offer is the portrait processing for memorial photos. Clients however often do not have a studio portrait photo, but they send us whole amateur photo with many people in it, with unnecessary space around the person whose portrait is required. In this case, just crop the narrow area around the person from which the portrait will be created. There is no need to spend pixels and MBs on, for example, the car next to the person, if there is no need to process the car, and so on. In this way, not only you save space and time, but correct cropping is useful for the quality of the scanned digital photograph. More on this in the text below.

Resolution

Every digital file that is sent to printing or engraving needs to satisfy the needs of the equipment that will process it. When it comes to printing photos for making ceramic pictures (like with every other quality printing), these files are processed at a resolution of 300dpi. The same applies to laser etching. This means that the final file we deliver must be at 300dpi resolution. The problem can appear when we get a picture that is very small and 72dpi at the same time. This often happens and then we need to increase its size by x times.

What is this really about? The simplest way to explain it would be that dpi stands for dots per inch (pixel per inch). So, the 300dpi resolution image has 300pixels (dots) per inch. More pixel density means a sharper, clearer, and therefore a better picture. Now, when we get a portrait scanned at 72dpi, it’s usually a very small image and we need to increase its resolution (density of dots) up to 300dpi, as well as the size. For example, from 2x3cm photo we need to get a picture that will go on to 24x30cm ceramic plaque.

This enlargement practically means that where there was one dot, now it has to be four or more dots. All of this is simply performed by algorithms with a single click, but the machine cannot know what the person whose portrait is being enlarged looked like and it will create additional dots that are similar to the nearest ones in order to fill formed gaps of the enlarged picture. The result is usually blurred, sometimes completely useless picture. The more we enlarge, the poorer the picture quality we get. If the image is scanned at 300dpi, this process will be painless. Always scan a photo (cropped area) to at least 300dpi!

The most important

Unbelievably, but not so rarely we get photos that are too cropped. For some reason, almost everything except the person’s face is missing. This picture, of course, cannot be processed, unless we add or draw in all those missing parts of hair, body, clothes to get a suitable picture for the monument. It is doable if there’s not too much of it missing. We regularly add parts of the body, clothes, etc. However, if it is necessary to add 50% of the picture that will go on the memorial photo, it is incredibly risky because we cannot know what the hair outline was like, and the family can find the appearance of a person unnatural and refuse to use the image and maybe even the whole order. The examples below will tell you the best what is it all about. After all, the process of adding missing areas in these pictures lasts forever if we want everything to look very natural, which unnecessarily takes us a lot of extra time, and that brings us back to the beginning of this post.

Amateur touching up

Sometimes families try to improve the picture on their own using various magic tools, automatic web services or even mobile apps. This of course results in additional ruining of already poor-quality image. The experience we have is most likely incomparably greater then theirs, and we will most definitely do a better job with the original picture than with these “touched up” pictures. You can send us such pictures as a reference file, but make sure you always send us the original, unspoiled picture.

Mobile phone pictures

Photos taken with mobile phones are, most of the times, very poor quality for processing. The camera can be bad, and the lightning is almost never good which directly affects the photo quality. If it is still necessary to process these photos, send us the photo from the phone memory, by all means, do not send us a screenshot from the phone display. It is by far the worst possible option, the quality of the camera is completely erased, and picture size and resolution are poor. So, forget about screenshots and try to get transfer of the picture from the phone memory to email or computer.

So, to summarize

If you have the opportunity to scan the photos you send us (or to anyone else), do it in the following way:

• Clean the scanner’s working surface
• Crop only the part of the photo that needs to be processed
• Make sure you haven’t cropped too much. Leave each and every part of the photo that needs to be used
• Set the resolution to at least 300dpi

This will take you one minute, and it can significantly contribute to quality of the final product (ceramic picture, laser etching or whatever) and shorten the processing period in many ways.

The bad photo that we get affects the quality of the memorial picture, and therefore the entire headstone. If you or your clients do not have the opportunity to scan a photo yourself, forget all this and send us what you have. During the 17 years we have processed thousands of such pictures and we guarantee that we will do the best possible job. But if there’s a possibility for obtaining the more accurate photo, please try to do so. We believe that every link in the industry should deliver the maximum quality if we want the perfect final product and satisfied customers. We are pretty sure that we all share the same goal.

The post How To Properly Scan a Photograph appeared first on Memorial Pic.

We received a picture of a violin that needed processing. The picture was already large and clear, we did nothing special, just proper converting to B&W and isolating it from the background. Because the violin Is really very beautiful we asked our client for permission to share this picture.

This application is appropriate for all music related memorials, it is suitable as standalone etching or as part of a larger design.

The picture is in transparent PNG format, dimensions are 60x68cm, 300dpi resolution.

This file is completely free for download.

[contact-form-7]

The post FREE – Violin, music related preparation for etching appeared first on Memorial Pic.

There are many of these, but we haven’t come across to any that included desert motifs, so we decided to prepare one. This powerful quote are words of general George Smith Patton, Jr. However, we did not include quotation marks or add an extra line of text to say who the author is, just to keep a simple and clean design.

As usual, we took several pictures free for commercial use to borrow elements to be used for our composition. In the end, all of the elements blended together beautifully into one picture.

All elements are separated in layers, so you can easily adjust them to your needs. It’s a PSD file, dimensions are 49.8 x 75 cm, 300dpi.

This file is completely free for download.

[contact-form-7]

The post FREE – Battlefield Cross for Laser Etching appeared first on Memorial Pic.

This took us some time, so we prepared few bird samples to be ready for use for potential future works.

The pictures are in PSD format of larger dimensions of 30-50cm, 300dpi resolution. For that reason, we had to enlarge them to the point that some of them decreased in quality, but they are still very usable as a motif for etching. Every bird has transparent background so it will perfectly blend in your needs. These files are completely free for download.

[contact-form-7]

The post FREE – Charming Birds Prepared for Etching appeared first on Memorial Pic.

We will try to prepare interesting stuff that can be of use for your work, which will be completely free. At the moment, it seems that these free items will mostly be files that can be used for laser etching, but we’ll probably come up with more interesting ideas.

Of course, no one should expect that this will be highly premium files, but we’ll definitely provide quality and large enough items with transparent background, so they can be added to your design in case you find them appropriate.

VERY IMPORTANT:

Every image we use for our works are free pictures fell into public domain, licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license and/ or free to be used for commercial purposes. These images are afterwards processed according to needs of the required design and some of them will be offered on these pages, free of charge.

Also, we work with pictures we received from our clients who gave us the permission to use them for other works, but these images probably will not be offered here.

Anyhow, we hope you will occasionally find something interesting on these pages.

The post Free Goods Occasionally appeared first on Memorial Pic.