The following touches on many subjects, although the original question was about installing a panel in a residential door. PATINA I patina all of my artworks with a black patina that says it is made for lead but works fine on zinc too. I use black all the time because I think the leadlines should recede from the viewers attention, that is, the leadlines should not compete with the glass for the viewer's attention. When the leadlines are not patina-ed or patina-ed with a shiny patina, their surfaces reflect room-light, and not always uniformly, either (solder being more reflective than lead, uneven patina results, etc.). This light-show grabs some of the attention away from the glass, and I think it looks better without it. This is particularly true when sunlight is present; I think the satiny charcoal gray (they call it black patina but it really comes out dark gray) looks much better. Hence, the following discussion is how I achieve a uniform charcoal gray matte patina on my leaded and foiled artworks. If you want to achieve one or more looks other than the one I opt for, then start with the information here and experiment until you have achieved satisfactory results. As always, I recommend that you try new techniques on scraps of metal and glass, rather than trying out new things in the middle of an actual project. Here's how I patina my work. I do it outside on my driveway because sunlight seems to help. But I don't leave the stained glass panel in the sun too long unattended on a warm day or the panel will get quite hot and this could even break an occasional piece of glass, especially if the artwork gets hot and you dowse it with cold water from the garden hose all at once. I did that once. Lay the panel down on a work board with the "front" side up. Wet the panel lightly with the hose, then squeeze on some "Soft Scrub" (I like the kind with bleach) and scrub the panel well (you need less than a tablespoon per square foot of artwork, and even less when you get to the backside because there will already be some see peage from the front to the back side. For scrubbing, I use a fingernail brush with a definite handle that sticks up so I can maintain a good grip on it. You don't want to lose your grip and break a piece of glass. Then, turn the panel over without washing off the soapy water. Wet and scrub the back side the same way. Use about half as much Soft Scrub. Always scrub gently but firmly. Adjust the hose nozzle to a medium hard stream, and wash off the soapy brew on the backside only (st gl still on the board). Drain as much of the water off as you can by lifting one edge of the work board and the panel together, holding it this way until most of the water has run off. The remaining water droplets don't seem to hinder the patina process. Put a heavy duty rubber glove on the hand you will apply the patina with (or both hands, if you prefer). Larger size gloves are easier to get on and off. Check to make sure no holes have developed in the finger areas sdince the last time you used the glove. If so, replace it or them. Patina is a mild acid - it can badly infect any cuts or openings you may have on your hands. Be Vigilent About Glove Safety. Use another fingernail brush (same style - different color) to apply the patina. Use nail brushes of two different colors in order to make sure that one is always for cleaning and the other is always for applying patina. Pour a small amount of patina from the bottle onto the nail brush (which is being held in your gloved hand). Do this over the panel so that excess patina will fall onto the panel as well. Scrub a small area of the panel with light to medium pressure (depending on the fragility of the panel itself and the glasses used). Make the patina go as far as possible, but also add a bit more whenever necessary. If you're using zinc came around the outside edge (as I believe one should do in almost all situations), scrub the zinc too. The patina should easily darken the lead and not so easily the zinc. However, the zinc will darken, too, with a little extra effort. Sometimes pouring on a little more patina does it, sometimes it's the patina-brush-scrubbing that does it, and sometimes it's both. If you didn't wipe the oleic acid flux off the solder joints soon enough or completely enough after soldering to zinc, you may have spots on the zinc near those solder joints where the darkening of the zinc will be even harder. But, these trouble spots can still be darkened if you continue to scrub them with the patina-fingernail-brush for ten seconds longer. Continue to scrub the entire panel until the lead has achieved a uniform dark charcoal gray. Use more patina as necessary. Fresh patina on any trouble spots will also help. With the hose nozzle set on a medium spray (a little less hard than before), stand the panel up on edge and wash the patina off the back side and the soap off the front side. Hold the panel upright a little longer to let most of the water drain off, then lay it down with the front side up. Patina the front side just as you did the back side. Stand the panel up on edge again and wash both sides with the hose, which is still set on medium. Make sure to blast away any spots where you see white (the soft scrub) inside the lead channels. Hold the panel upright until most of the water has run off. On a nice day, I usually stand the panel up against my car or a wall or some other vertical surface to let additional water run off. Doing this where sunlight can fall on the panel will aid the drying process. While it is standing up, I put away the rest of the tools and supplies. Then I wipe the panel dry on both sides with a large clean bath towel that I use for shop purposes only. Finally, wash your hands with Boraxo Powdered Hand Soap to remove any patina from your skin. The final rinsing may cause some or most of the patina to wash off of the zinc in places. However, once the zinc has been darkened, it will darken again quickly with hardly any effort. I touch up these troubled areas just as I'm installing the panel. Going back and trying to redo them durning the patina process will usually not help as the patina will easily wash off those same areas. Wait until you're installing the panel, then touch up the patina with a small rag in a gloved hand. Touch up the patina on the back side before installing the panel, then touch up the front side after the installation is complete. PUTTY What I am about to write may or may not work for your particular installation. For example, you may choose not to putty a stained glass panel if there is clear glass mounted water-tight on the outside of it already. If not, then putty may be necessary to achieve some degree of weatherproofing. Whether or not to putty a panel may also depend on your level of craftsmanship. Precision craftsmanship - defined as no internal gaps between lead came and the glass on both sides -  will allow you to avoid puttying in many situations. I will explain in more detail below. To putty or not to putty? Most people are taught that all stained glass panels MUST be puttied. They will give you lots of reasons why this is the only right way, but their strong beliefs are usually based on what they have been taught rather than on actual experience both ways, that is, with puttying stained glass panels AND not puttying stained glass panels. I was originally taught to putty all of my leaded work, and I did so for several decades. But eventually I stumbled onto the small school of thought that putty does not do what it is supposed to do over the long haul, and that seemed to fit with my experience also. It always seemed to me that putty most often served to hide an imprecise level of craftsmanship, and those putty-filled gaps between glass and lead came would eventually succumb to gravity and expansion from temperature changes and cause the stained glass to have structural problems. In my early career as a professional stained glasser, I did a lot of repair work on old stained glass. It became obvious that although 100% of the old stained glass windows I worked on were puttied, putty didn't work to prevent them from sagging or falling apart or developing other structural problems. I now believe that only [1] good design, [2] adequate support built into or onto the stained glass panel, and [3] precise craftsmanship on the interior of the lead channels will keep a panel from buckling or sagging over time. Good design means learning to identify the "weak" spots in a stained glass design, These would include [1] straight lines (especially horizontal lines) that can become hinge points for gravity to work on, [2] lead or zinc cames that are too thin for the size of the stained glass, [3] the choice of lead vs. zinc along the outside edge, [4] inadequate or sloppy mounting, as well as other factors. Many flaws that wouldn't show up until much later can be designed out of a project while it is still on paper. Others issues can be dealt with by adding additional support to the artwork. Adequate support means either building additional support into the plane of the panel or adding it onto the completed panel. One way to achieve this is to design in vertical lines that can be zinc instead of lead, and having them traverse the entire length of the panel (if possible) or start at the bottom and go as far up the panel as possible. One example of this is the window you can see here. Not only is the outer came zinc, but the vertical lines just in from the outer came are zinc, too, and they go from the bottom to the top with no cuts (i.e. not crossed by horizontal cames) or splices (one piece of zinc came from bottom to top). In fact, I believe that I did all of the outer border on this panel in zinc. This (along with precise craftsmanship throughout) allowed me to NOT use any support bars on the back side nor any putty. In situations where internal zinc is not possible, attaching steel rebar to the back of a panel is the way to achieve adequate support (where the size of the panel warrants it). Precise craftsmanship is the primary focus of my dvd set. The methodology I teach is one that should (after lots of prcatice and with the right attitude) allow you to achieve a tight fit between glass and lead along all of the interior leadlines. In fact, it is the precise craftsmanship that allows me to build almost all of my panels on my work table without a pattern underneath. While adopting my methods will not allow you to do this immediately, there should come a time when your panels come out so well on top of the cartoon that you will chance doing your next project without one. When you do get to point where your panels come out the right shape and size (cartoon underneath or not), then you will probably be able to stop puttying, too. MOUNTING OPTIONS There are many unique situations requiring unique solutions when installing stained glass, which is why my dvds could not possibly cover all of the possibilities. The one I show is the most common type today, that is, installing on the interior side of an existing pane of clear glass (or sometimes on the inside of a thermal unit, that is, a sandwich of two sheets of clear glass with a sealed air space in the middle). So the first question you should ask yourself when installing stained glass into an opening (that is, any exterior door or window) that has no clear glass in it is "Should there be a piece of clear glass, too?" I think the answer should be yes whenever that's possible... caulk in a piece of clear glass, then decide how (and where) to mount the stained glass. If the opening or "rabet" (a rabet is a 90-degree indentation or lip in the wood) has the depth to accept the clear glass as well as the stained glass, then mounting them together would be the best option. If this type of mounting causes the wood stops to stick out beyond the rabet, the wood stops could be shaved down on a table saw (gotta know what your doing with power tools!) or maybe left out altogether (or switched to other sized material that will look fine while accommodating both layers). If the opening is not deep enough to accommodate both, then I would install the clear glass where the old stained glass panel went and make the stained glass panel smaller so that it fits inside the wood stop, as though the stop was not removable in the first place and you still had to figure out how to mount a stained glass panel there. NON RECTANGULAR PANELS For an oval shaped panel, a full size template of the opening must be made (no matter where in the door the stained glass panel will be mounted). Cardboard or construction paper taped together can make a useful template. I have even used newspaper to do this, although a balance between stiff enough to stand firmly in the opening and pliable enough to be scored and cut to size is best. When I have had to use a flimsy material like newspaper, I would usually make a fairly accurate template for the top of the panel, then tape that into the opening with small pieces of masking tape near the top in order to finish making the template at the bottom. One may have to reposition the template many times in order to cut small bits off until the template is the right size. If too much is cut off, you can mark the template itself with written notes such as, "add a hair here" or "add 1/16" between this mark and that mark." EDGING MATERIALS As to using lead or zinc for the border, I would always use zinc for strength whenever that was possible. The limitation is that zinc is hard to bend around tight curves, especially as the size of the zinc came increases. But the tall oval in the photo you sent should still be able to have 1/4" zinc came around the outside edge. as explained in the chapter on leading non-rectangular projects, the glass and lead would all be leaded together on the worktable, and held in place with nails all around. Then, start putting on the zinc in the shallowest part of the curve. when you get to the end curves, that is, the deepest part of the curve, the zinc is bent around the glass itself. If this is done slowly and with care, the resulting edge should look flawless. If you do decide to use a lead came around the outside edge instead of zinc, then I would use a U-lead came... one with only one channel. This is because the weight of the panel on the walls of the outer channel of an H-lead came will eventually cause those outer channel walls to compress, lowering the panel from its original mounting position, which can create an actual visual flaw at the top of the mounting... either too much lead showing at the top and not enough showing at the bottom or an opening at the top where one can see right through the space that was created over time. I've seen multiple examples of both. I hope it seems obvious that one must consider the edging and the mounting method that will be used when one first assesses a commission. I, myself, write down in my measurement book [1] any oddities of the mounting situation, [2] what kind of an edge I will use, and [3] what kind of a mounting I will attempt (wood stop, no wood stop, caulked or no caulk, painted or not painted, etc.) FINAL TOUCH-UPS WHEN INSTALLING Re-finishing the door to hide any dings created in the stop removal and replacement is something the customer will expect, so plan to come prepared to fill gouges and resand or repaint as necessary. You may even feel that a stop will get broken into many pieces when it is removed, and so you'll want to talk to the client about replacing it altogether. Also, talk to the client about whether they still have the stain or varnish or paint that surrounds the window or door as one or more of those may be necessary to refinish the doors. The potential need to refinish the wood or plastic or metal sash may also influence the mounting option used. Be sure to work all of this out when you assess the project, as it may influence the edging material or the actual size of the panel or panels. PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR ARTWORK Stained glass is an artistic medium that is very hard to photograph. I have tried using professional photographers, but although they did not believe me that they were unlikely to get better results than I could, not one of them got any better results than mine. so I say, "don't spend the money on professionals... learn to do it yourself." Stained glass is hard to film because the light is coming through the artwork rather than just bouncing off the surfaces as it does in paintings or sculpture or jewelry or other art forms. Glasses right next to each other may pass very different amounts of light. This usually makes the darker ones appear too black when the lighter ones are accurate or the lighter ones appear too white when the darker ones are accurate. Also, an artwork that has a lot of clear glass along with some amount of color will often make the colors look too dark (if underexposed) or the textures of the clear glasses impossible to see (if overexposed). It is crucial to take good photos of every artwork you make so that you can show an impressive physical portfolio (images on paper) to potential clients. I always found that taking slides was the best. You can take many slides for very little money and then have the best ones printed on good photographic paper for mounting in your portfolio. There are companies in most big cities that do nothing but develop and print slides, so look for one near you rather than using a mass-production setup like Walmart or your local grocery store. Slides are also used often for getting into craft shows and art shows. Label your boxes of slides well so you can easily find what you need. If you are going to develop a web site, you may not need slides at all. You may want to go with digital images only. However, if you intend to enter craft shows, be sure to take both slides and digital images when you have the opportunity, which is usually just after you have installed the artwork. Go to the installation fully prepared to take all of the photos you will need because it is often the case that to come back later is impossible or highly inconvenient for your former client. I take and retake photos until I get a good one. When later opportunities to photograph something may not be available, I take LOTS of photos the first time, bracketing from underexposed (way too dim) on up to greatly overexposed (way too much light). I do this because the afterimage that appears in a digital camera just after taking a picture can look just fine, but once its on my computer it turns out to be way too dark. I also believe strongly in using a tripod to make sure that every photo is crisp: a blurred photo is a waste of time and effort (if not film). For images of a 3D artwork or a lampshade or a sconce, I like to vary the angle at which the photo is taken. However, straight-on shots of a flat artwork should ALWAYS be shot from dead center (exactly half way up and perfectly centered from left to right) so that there will be little or no paralax (skewing) in the final image. I rarely use a flash when taking either digital images or slides. Stained glass will usually reflect the flash and ruin the photo altogether, or at least make many of the colors appear off from their actual hue. Learn where the brightness feature is on your digital camera, and use that to bracket the amount of light instead of a flash. Try to take photos at the best time of day, which I think is when strong but indirect sunlight is coming through the stained glass. I often arrange installations so that I will finish just when the sun is optimal in the sky. When photographing a hanging artwork in my living room window, I often shoot it many times of the day on sunny days and on cloudy days, too, so that I have at least one image where the light is good and the colors are right. If there are clear glasses or pale colors, I usually try shooting it with a thin gauzy white paper behind it, again on both sunny and cloudy days and at many times during those days. It is also crucial to learn to use the features in a photo-manipulation software. I have mastered Corel PhotoPaint because it came with the CorelDraw program I use to draw my projects with. Once you have experimented with software of this type, you can reduce the full size of an image and.or reduce the file size of the image. You can also adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, hue, and tone of any photo. This means that a not-quite-useable photo can often be turned into a useable one. You can also learn how to zoom deep into a photo to grab some pixels that are the right color and move them to places where the color is too light or too dark. Also, that same technique will allow you to remove telephone wires or other obstructions that were behind the stained glass when you shot the photo. You can also learn how to create filled rectangles, remembering that a straight leadline is nothing more in a photo than a long thing rectangle filled with black. This allows you to strengthen some leadlines when too much sun is making them look too thin or darken leadlines where needed. If you surf a few web sites on stained glass and compare those images to the images in my online gallery, you will quickly see how the time and effort that has gone into my site's images makes for a better impression. Believe me, it makes a big difference to clients. You also need to shoot hi-res photos for submissions to [1] publishers for art books and [2] public art projects. These can be reduced in physical size and/or file size for use on the internet or in emails. READ MY LIPS ON THIS: No one appreciates a photo in an email that they have to scroll sideways or up and down to see all of it. Keep photos of different sizes and resolutions in different (clearly marked) folders on your computer so that you will always have just the right image available for every purpose.