Smiles in Blocks of Crystals
Personalized gifts are becoming a popular choice for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and baptism. These keepsakes can either be a gift to the celebrant or as party/event favors as well. It comes in many forms like personalized T-shirts, frames, photo albums, photo cubes, mugs, pillows, and photo gifts. Aside from the delight of receiving gifts, people are also fond of stashing party favors and event memorabilia. And if you are the celebrant, you want your party favors to be special, unique, and with a personal touch. And one of the most popular party favor and gift choice is an engraved keepsake known as crystal photo gifts.
Crystal photo gifts are popular in weddings, debuts, and even in baptisms. The photo or images of the bride and groom or a debut celebrant is captured inside a crystal. This makes a perfect event memorabilia if you want the affair to be remembered for years. It is also a popular gift choice among people who are tired of picking or buying gifts from the mall. Nowadays, people like to put extra effort on gift buying by requesting their gifts to be personalized. Traditionally, crystal photo gifts were limited only to generic images like animals, flowers, or buildings. But because the world of photography has embraced new technologies lately, people can now immortalized their likeness or someone else’s smile inside a block of crystal.
To engrave a person’s image inside a crystal, a process called SSLE (subsurface laser engraving) is used. The image is engraved in the surface of a solid material with the use of optical clarity to minimize laser distortion. A customer must first submit a 2D picture that will be engraved in the crystal. Some companies even offer services of taking 3D pictures of their customers by using special cameras and scanners. 2D pictures that will be submitted should have high quality since these impacts the finished product. The 2D photo is then edited using enhancement programs to further modify the quality of the photo. After the 2D photo passed quality checking, this is converted into a 3D image with the use of advanced software and methods. Once the 3D image is built, it is converted into a point cloud file that will be used for the 3D laser engraving. This process creates 3 dimensional images inside the glass. The laser creates images by burning through the wall of the block of crystal by following the 3 dimension point cloud. The German photo gifts, called "fotogeschenke" by Starlaser is one of the highest quality available.
Photo gifts in crystal or glasses come in many forms: photo blocks, pendants, keyrings or keychains, photo frames, and even paper weights. To capture smiling faces in elegant pieces of crystals only proves that the art of gift giving is no longer just a passing fancy of going through rows and rows of racks in the mall. We have already put too much effort in it, enough to bring out unique ideas.
