Well done...you get a sticker!

I know.  It seems really cheap to just put a sticker where there should be an inlay but Art & Lutherie obviously took advantage of that when they designed the rosette so I figured, why not go all out and use stickers on the fretboard as well?

I found this website offering a variety of guitar inlay stickers:

http://www.inlaystickers.com

While the site shows pictures of the stickers on actual instruments, I wanted to see how they would look on *my* guitar.  I also wanted to see how different combinations of fretboard inlays and rosettes would look.  This calls for Photoshop!

Rosette removal:

Removing the rosette required taking some of the nearby pixels and cutting/pasting them over top of the rosette.  I then used the healing brush to cover up any abrupt changes.

Pickguard removal: 

The pickguard covers a significantly bigger area than the rosette, so nearby patches of the wood grain would be insufficient to cover the pickguard.  Fortunately, acoustic guitar tops are 'book matched': a sheet of wood is split through the middle and opened like a book.  This results in a generally symmetrical wood grain.  Therefore, the wood grain underneath the pickguard (high E side) is roughly a mirror image of the low E side of the guitar.  So I selected the pixels on the low E side of the guitar, flipped them horizontally, and pasted them over the pickguard (again, healing brush to clean it up).

Here's the before and after photoshop:

The image below shows what my guitar probably looked like in the factory, before they installed the rosette and pickguard

Next post...adding the new inlays and rosette digitally...

The first thing to label with a new label-maker...

...is the label-maker itself.  So analogously, the first post in a blog about my spare time endeavours is about starting a blog!  

As an engineer at heart (and soon, by schooling), I can't help but tinker with things, question the status quo, and envision possibilities.  The endeavour that has sparked my interest in blogging about it is improving the aesthetics of my acoustic guitar.  Living on a student's budget, hiring a luthier to add a custom rosette and fretboard inlays would be out of the question.  

My guitar as-is: Art & Lutherie High-Gloss Spruce with Quantum I electronics. This photo was originally taken vertically, but I rotated it to maximize the screen usage on my monitor (hence the chopped off corners). The guitar sounds great but, to me, is cosmetically lacking: plain-old dot fret markers, standard pickguard shape, and a bulging plastic rosette that isn't even inlaid (it's a sticker).

Next post...how I will modify my guitar on a student's budget...