Been using Lightburn and laser engraving for a couple of years now. Pretty comfortable with doing engraving on wood, glass, tile now. But engraving jpg photos seems to have eluded me. Tried a few times and not very good results. Wonder if anyone would be willing to share an engraving file with me where they have successfully engraved a jpg photo so i could look at the settings.
There are some very popular video tutorials available for processing images, I linked some of them here: Specific guides - Diode Laser Wiki
1 Like
Not very likely it would be the same for you as it was for me. Lots of variables:
- Glaze on tile
- Tile color under glaze
- Moisture content of tile
- image quality
- Laser characteristics
- Tile coating used
- Tile coating application
- How much patience you have
- Whether or not a UFO is in the area
Images are the most difficult thing you can do with a laser. It involves a lot of trial and error. What I have not noticed is a difference between file types, like JPG, BMP, TIFF, and so on.
The link @misken provided is a superb place to start. My favorite are the 2 videos with the pretty girl in them.
1 Like
I don´t think a file will help you improving your picture engraving. However I can highly recommend the first 2 videos in the Wiki, @misken posted, about finetuning the dpi.
I went 254 dpi on all my projects (wood, slate, glass etc.).
For a simple fill it is still a great setting but for a dither pattern it was way to high dpi, cause the scanlines were overlapping and the dither pattern was not good at all.
What helped me?
Establish a workflow with a focus block, so the hight from the surface to the laser is always the same.
Lowering dpi + dot width correction.
It required a lot of fine tuning for each material.
For my 30W diode:
Wood ~ 150 dpi
Slate & coated Glas ~ 200 dpi
Coated Aluminum ~ 225 dpi
And as @MikeyH stated, every change in your workflow e.g. coating used, how you apply the coating, change of supplier for base materials or even a different batch from the same supplier… can have an impact on your finetuned settings.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.