Still totally new here. I’ve done 3 items so far but, I would really like to try and etch this image on a piece of wood for my wife for our anniversary next month. She loves George Strait. I found this online and can order as a poster but, I thought engraving would be more sentimental.
I imported the image and looked at image trace. Messed around with it a bit then traced it and tossed out the original image. I looked at the preview and it said it would take 15 hours! Now granted I haven’t adjusted any settings yet but, does that sound right?
I’m running a 50w laser. Any idea on what settings should be? Or should I just ditch this project? Lol
Working area is 300x500 or 12"x20". Honestly I didn’t even get that far to check settings. I’ll look tomorrow and get back to you. Silly question, what is DPI?
DPI is dots-per-inch (resolution). Up to 300DPI or even 500DPI for high resolution wouldn’t be unusual with a good mechanical system, alignment, and mirrors/lens.
However, the higher the DPI the slower the overall speed as well (slow speed, higher detail; high speed, lower detail)
8mm/sec is awfully slow for an engraving. You should be able to just run that as an image directly with the default settings (254 DPI, Stucki dither) and change the power and speed to whatever is appropriate for your machine. For a 50w, I would try about 6% power, 300 mm/sec as a starting point - you might need more power, but try a small run with that to see how it works.
Just import the image, yes. DPI is “dots per inch” - it controls the spacing of the shading dots and you should choose a value that matches the resolution possible with your machine. 254 is a good starting point.
DPI affects the overall time it takes to run the image, because a higher DPI value means more lines are processed. If you run a 1 inch square, set to 200 DPI, it is also running 200 lines for each inch of the image. If you set it to 300 DPI, now it will also run 300 lines per inch of image, so it’ll take longer.
I thought image trace was mandatory.
Image trace takes an image and converts it to vectors (line art). If you want the image to be reproduced as-is, leave it as an image.
Something like would probably work a lot better as an image trace rather than an image.
On the other hand, an image trace wouldn’t do any good for something like
would probably work a lot better as an image trace rather than an image.