Example - Merging Three Mono Layers into Grey

December 3, 2021

In this example we are going to take 3 Gerber files, rasterize them and then merge them to make a grey-scale image.

Gerber Files

Below you can see the 3 Gerber Files we start with.

Left: top.gbr         Center: top_mask.gbr         Right:drill.gbr

Rasterization

We will use Artwork's GBR_RIP program to rasterize each of these three file at 1016 DPI so that we have a monochrome TIFF file for each Gerber file.

c:\wcad\GBRIP64\gbr2tiff64.exe            path to gbr2tiff64 exectuable
 .\top.gbr                                input Gerber file
   -274x                                  -274x flag
     -pack:.\top.tif                      create TIFF packbits
        -dpm:40                           dots/mm (=1016 DPI)
           -units:mm                      units for command line
             -wplot 4.8,7.3 96.8,48.5     raster window (LLx,LLy,URx,URy)

The Merge Table

Let's start with the following merge table (monomerge_3layersA.txt)

LAYERS 3
DEFAULT 0
000 0
001 80
010 100
100 120
011 180
101 200
110 220
111 255