Hello so I’m having issues setting up my laser engravings. I have a 3018pro, with a 3000mw laser and it runs on the regular LaserGRBL. I tried running a grayscale image and it was about 146mm by about 150mm it had been running for about 6hrs and a half and it was at 52% of completion. Everything that was etched on the wood looked real bad. Help would be really apreciated. If you need more info just let me know and I’ll post pictures. Thanks in advance!!!
I think it would be best to start with showing the input picture you used so we can see what it’s supposed to look like
Did you save the job u used to burn the image shown, can you post the save file so i can see what settings you used. Your output looks close to what i got the first time i tried a picture I found this link below to be really informative its for 3d grayscale but still showed me a lot about getting the input image right before burning. Another question what is the material you are burning the image on?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O01POwqfMbQ
I had my machine running too fast on the first pass, which gave a flat gray scale without any cutting that was way better than my initial tries for doing pictures for my machine with a 30 watt laser i got this with a max power of 80 and a min Power of 10 and a speed of 7000mm/min.
I have since done more passes on the file and this is the final output which has depth now, although i did learn if you are going to do multiple passes its better to turn min power to zero after the first couple of passes. From my tests now i find that 2200mm/min is a good speed for my machine with a max power of 80 to 90 percent and min of 0 but only because its not my first pass. I am gonna try another with 2200mm/mm with Max 90 and Min 3 on my next test.
I had it going at about 1500mm/m i think thats why it came out like that. I spend all day yesterday going through the forums and i got a general idea of what i was doing. The material im using is MDF, everything that ive ran comes out great on that material. So I changed quite a good amount of settings. Before importing the image to lightburn im making the image to grayscale in a program called Gimp and setting the distortion to newspaper. After that i import it to Lightburn and i changed my speed to 3000mm/m and running the power at 100.
Yea that 3d grayscale is amazing.
renata.lbrn2 (562.2 KB)
So what do you think about these last two save files. I tried running one of them and the final piece wasnt so bad. Do drawings come out better than pictures themselves or is it maybe the settings. As you can see the joker came out looking good compared to the last image.
Hi Ozzie, you are getting to grips very well from what you have shown, good job you and welcome to lasering and all of it’s little special areas.
One of the things with this is that, to a great degree the output image, raster results are all subjective.
There are a couple of things that can help the process run smoothly and effectively though.
…Write everything down and where possible reference images to the results
…Try things at least twice
…Be critical about your material as well as machine settings, image prep etc.
… Remember other people see different things in a result. Where that refers to a technical something, super, listen intently, where it’s about the image…if you like it…then it’s great 
…Try small testers often, it saves time and materials
…Keep your laser maintained, they need care to work consistently well.
…Use the forum, like, read the forum, lots and lots, even things you haven’t had an issue with yet might come up and when it does, and with me that’s always at the most inconvenient time, what you read might well help
Talk soon and keep up the great work and sharing 
Thank you very much for your kind words. I tried to make everything come out how I imagined it and it sure did. As you say I did have to delve in the forums until I found a similar case. Im glad im part of the lightburn fam. Thank you very much again. God Bless!!
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