Hi,
I am new here and to laser engraving, watching youtube videos made me expand into laser engraving and cutting.
I bought it to complement my 3D Printer’s but I am having issues engraving any photo to plywood coasters that I bought off amazon, I just can not seem to nail down the settings to get any details.
if you have some basic settings I could work off that would be greatfully recieved.
IMHO, it’s best to think of a laser much like a printing press, you only have black and white, so the image is a ‘dither’ of shapes to fool the eye into thinking it’s a gray scale.
How close to a photo is really how well you control the damage to the material.
There is a materials test in the ‘laser tools’ drop down that will allow a group of boxes at different speeds/power settings to help you find a range that you wish to use. There are also lots of threads at the site you can search on.
There is also a site imag-R among others that will on-line process a photo and create the dither. You can then download it and lase it. You need to enable ‘pass through’ in the layer so Lightburn doesn’t attempt to dither the dither…
With the exception of having to lighten/darken specific parts of an image, the Lightburn tools are very effective and easy to use.
The material you choose is critical for a good reproduction. It will have a light to dark range that is rather small…
Try testing your materials so you have some idea of how they are responding to different speed/power settings.
You have also started your laser journey with probably the most difficult thing you can do with a laser…
I have ordered some mdf and birch plywood blanks to see if there any different and to see if i can get some details (mainly shading) currently using jarvis or dither on this material and its not working.
Would be great to see greyscale or halftone but its a no go at the moment, i have plenty of pine in my shed so will give that a go aswell.
I am getting varying results from the blanks listed above, same image, same settings, seems strange
