Quote Originally Posted by tjones View Post
If you are doing just this type of work the Bobart Pro will be great. It will convert the photo for you to greyscale. It will then be able to work well.

As for photo manipulation (Bobart is not going to help here) you can get very nice stuff for free. I would suggest using a free program called Inkscape for one. It has many plugins for effects and can vectorize as well.

If you decide not to use Bobart then try VCarve. I would not give much hope to most of the free 'photo to tool path' programs out there. They do not do a very good job from what I have saw.
As far as free photo manipulation software I would definately say GIMP is my favorite. If you're familiar with Photoshop you will pick up GIMP very quickly. Either way, if you have a good photo editing program and BobART you can accomplish some pretty cool work..I've seen great results!