Engraving help with photo

Hi,
I am needing help with engraving a photo…so many options. Unsure of best place to start with Speed, power, and DPI…I have the 100watt Camfive laser.


Thanks in advance!!

Speed and power will completely depend on many factors we can’t guess, starting with what you are engraving on. Wood, brick, tile, stainless steel, anodized aluminum?

I love the doggie, but his face is way too close in color to the couch. I would really suggest cropping the picture and carefully editing it to get contrast. Maybe make the couch white. If you need a photo editor for free, I suggest Gimp. It’s kind of like photoshop but the price is much better.

I would change the picture to the resolution your laser engraver uses. Mine is 254 dpi. Again, Gimp does this.

Then comes the experimentation. There are SO many ways to do a picture’s conversion of color into black and white short segments. Dithering is very popular. Lightburn does several natively. A photo editor like Gimp will help you there.

Whatever material you choose to burn it on, get scrap pieces for tests. Plan on running through a LOT of them!

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Thank you so much! At least I know where to start now!

If it were me, I would use gimp to turn the couch and muzzle brown/tan to white, no burning. Then make a very solid outline of your dog on the image. Use your outlines to make the shadows of the couch around the cushions to show those curves the dog makes as well. A dozen well placed lines will show that it is a dog on a couch and will also keep the dog as the focus and center of the whole picture. I wouldn’t have anything besides the couch and the dog shown - no stove, chair, bricks or other clutter. The dog on the couch is the story and the couch is all you need for background for the dog.

Remember those eyes and the light of the eyes. Those should be the absolute core of the shot. The eyes window the soul.

Most of these engravers work at 10th of a mm resolution, or 254 dpi. Having your image at 254 dpi helps to get accurate sizing. That said, if that is the actual size of the picture then you don’t have high resolution there.