Step by step
Engrave a photograph that does not come out as mud
A photograph on wood or acrylic that you can recognise from across a room.
Before you start
Anybody who has tried once and got a dark smudge.
- A photograph with real contrast. A dim phone picture will not improve here.
- A scrap of the material, because this always takes two attempts.
Understand what the laser can and cannot do
A photograph has hundreds of tones. The laser has two: burnt and not burnt. Everything in between is an illusion made from marks of different sizes and spacings.
That is why a picture that looks fine on screen can come out as a dark smudge. The screen has greys. The wood does not.
Fix the picture before the machine sees it
Contrast matters more than resolution. Lift the light areas and deepen the dark ones until the picture looks slightly harsh on screen, because the material will flatten it again.
Crop to the subject. A face at 40 mm across engraves; the same face in a wide shot does not.
Let it convert the tones to dots
The engraver turns the picture into a pattern of dots whose density carries the tone. From reading distance your eye puts them back together as shading.
Different dot patterns suit different materials. Test rather than reason about it: it costs one small piece of scrap.
Test small, then commit
Engrave a 40 mm patch of the busiest part of the picture, not a clean corner. Look at it in the light it will live in.
The material decides more than any setting. Light ply, dark acrylic and anodised aluminium all behave differently, and none of them behaves like the screen.
Every setting, and what it does
11In the order you meet them. The second line on each is what goes wrong when it is set badly, which is usually the more useful half.
Which photo. 0 is the first one you dropped on the canvas.
Starts at 0
Dot pattern style
One of: Hard threshold, Ordered, Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Stucki, Photo (JJN), Vary the power
Detail, in dots per inch (250 is 0.1 mm between lines)
Starts at 250
How many power levels. More is smoother and a bigger file.
Starts at 12
Power for the palest part, as a share of the layer's own.
Starts at 0
Brightness cut-off between burn and skip (0 to 255)
Starts at 128
Layer to put the engrave on
Starts at 1
Before dithering. Under 1 opens up midtones, over 1 darkens them.
Starts at 0.5
Levels and sharpening before dithering, for flat photos.
Starts off
Engrave the main subject only. Background stays blank.
Starts off
One of: Rows, Columns, Automatic
How to know it worked
- The subject is recognisable from two metres away.
- The light areas are still light rather than all burnt.
- The dark areas have detail rather than being solid black.
When it goes wrong
3It came out as a dark smudge.
Too much power, or a picture with too little contrast. Lower the power first, because it is the cheaper thing to test.
It is too faint.
Not enough power, or a material that does not darken much. Light ply and clear acrylic both need a different approach from dark wood.
There are visible lines across it.
That is banding: the scan gap is too wide, or the two directions of the sweep do not line up. Check the scan offset.