3d carving tutorials

I am a newbie to the snapmaker and the thing I want to learn is how to take a photo and render it for 3d carving. I’ve used photoshop for years, so i can easily remove backgrounds and identify the “subject” I want to carve, but, how to I render it into an appropriate 3d grayscale image? For example, if I wanted to 3d carve my cockatoo from a photo I have, her beak is black but her body is white…this would make her beak protrude while her white feathers would be depressed into the carving. How do I make her 3d (I guess using meshes?)? What software is best for this? Any excellent youtube tutorials? I’ve been googling but I get the standard hogwash of “make an image greyscale then invert”. This will make an image, sure, but not a fancy 3d carving. I strongly suspect my googling is failing me because I haven’t yet learned the correct terminology. Also, bonus points if you point me in the direction of free software OR photoshop (because I have photoshop…also, blender, ink scape, and fusion 360).

Thanks in advance.

The problem is it’s just not something easy to do.

Here’s a nice article that explains the problems:
http://danceswithferrets.org/geekblog/?p=1053&fbclid=IwAR3DYjnY9HelMLYfFkUIKDkf6wVLhsdWbGKJNKeOxAHKCcnfZo-WOIAPVrg

There are some newer tools around that can be used to create a 3d image that might help:
https://www.smoothie-3d.com/site/page_index.php

https://3dp.rocks/lithophane/

Lastly there’s
https://www.vectric.com/products/photovcarve

-S