Hi ya all. I have a K40 and just upgraded to mini Gerbil / lightburn
I’m struggling with engraving pictures - I bought an external script to work with photoshop and seen others photos of their work mine looks absolute pants compared to theirs
on wood my minimum marking the wood at Speed 150 is 8.5% and dark is about 15 to 16% I’ve tried pass through (as dithered externally) and grayscale - I’ve set Smax and $30 to 2000
On another issue I found that the head moves fast which has caused the 2nd mirror nuts to come loose (notices mirror movement on engraving) to align mirrors how do I do test fire and also release rail
Final issue Ive bought a new batch of ply (3mm) same supplier Popular B/BB which I have had previously. my last batch was birch BB/BB. This has the feel and weight of balsa - I can break it between my finger and thumb. it cuts like a knife to hot butter and like for like speed and power it engraves far too deep and even though I have reduced speed / power it does not have the detail. Has anyone else had wood like this.
You might need to slow down. I’m not sure how fast Gerbil processes raster data or changes PWM output rates, and you haven’t mentioned what DPI you’re trying either. I usually do the dithering directly in LightBurn, and go slow with low power and a slight defocus to get good contrast for the burn.
Start with the default DPI, dial in as good as you can get with that setting first, then increase DPI or speed, or any other parameter, one at a time, so you can see what affect you’re having without guesswork. It takes effort and time.
If the images you’re using are dithered externally with some other script, you will have to set them as pass-through in LightBurn, or LightBurn will re-dither them, and that destroys the details. DPI will be set from the external file when you dither it.
You are also likely running too fast - good shading usually comes from going slow, with lower power, because it gives the wood time to darken & char, instead of vaporizing.
If you dithered externally, use pass-through. LightBurn also resizes images to match the output size / DPI you asked for, and if that’s different, even by a fraction, it can produce weird artifacts on the image. If you dither outside of LightBurn, you basically have to use pass-through. If you leave the dithering step off, and let LightBurn dither for you, you have a lot more flexibility.
