James Dean on Maple

The Legend

James Dean (Rebel without a Cause)

White washed Maple

2.5 watt Eleksmaker

1200 mm/min 50% power 339 DPI

LightBurn Stucki Dither

105 x 105 mm 110 minutes


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Cracking

Would it be possible to see how light you make the image in Lightburn before you burn it…

… I see the original image above but want to compare it to the image you have ‘sent’ to the machine if that makes sense.

I have the white paint, the wood etc and your work really inspires me to get out and engrave…

I resize and set DPI in PaintShop Pro…send to LightBurn…play a bit with shape properties…gamma …contrast…then Stucki…this is basically what James looked like before engraving

Looks great! Why do you mention white paint? Are we supposed to be painting wood before engraving? I was hoping to work on natural wood, but I have maple to work with and if im not mistaken, engravings come out really spotty on Maple(and some other types of wood, if someone wouldnt mind telling me what these are).

Also, It seems most people prep an image using outside sofware, such as AI. What is the main purpose behind this? What kind of settings should I be adjusting?

I “White wash” the Maple
wet in down with Lacquer thinner…then spray light coat of flat white…wait couple minutes and rub and wipe off
you can still see the grain but the Lacquer thinner and light coat appears to seal the grain
Gives a more homogeneous surface and better contrast
As for prepping I use Paintshop Pro 19 to resize and set DPI to exactly what I set /use in LightBurn
Most times I use LightBurn to adj gamma…contrast etc untill the photo has the “laser look”
Then use stucki or jarvis dither

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Ok, awesome. Can you describe what you mean by the “laser look”? Im assuming this means lots of contrast? How about your min and max power settings and speed settings for that job? Is there a reason you didnt use true grayscale mode?

All the settings are posted in description
Laser look means you get to know what the photo should look like for best Laser engraving
Min max are only used with CO2 Lasers
Greyscale is extremely hard to get right
plus all the information required to do the encoding in software is too much for 8 bit nano to handle
This is from Oz (Lightburn)
LightBurn Oz
September 7
You have an 8-bit, 16MHz Ardiuno controller, so you’re likely hitting the processing speed limit.

Grayscale tends to produce one GCode instruction for every pixel of an image. Dithering will do that at the exact 50% gray point, but for lighter or darker areas, the dot density is lower, so there’s less GCode overall to process.

At 300 DPI, with grayscale, you’ll be making 300 GCode instructions per inch. At 1500mm/min you’re at almost exactly 1 inch per second, so about 300 instructions per second. I believe 8-bit GRBL handles about 250, so you won’t be going full speed.
Reducing the DPI will increase the speed it can go, or you could look into a 32 bit GRBL compatible controller.
Good min max explanation…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqQyhW4uSsM

Greyscale limitations
LightBurn Oz
September 7
You have an 8-bit, 16MHz Ardiuno controller, so you’re likely hitting the processing speed limit.

Grayscale tends to produce one GCode instruction for every pixel of an image. Dithering will do that at the exact 50% gray point, but for lighter or darker areas, the dot density is lower, so there’s less GCode overall to process.

At 300 DPI, with grayscale, you’ll be making 300 GCode instructions per inch. At 1500mm/min you’re at almost exactly 1 inch per second, so about 300 instructions per second. I believe 8-bit GRBL handles about 250, so you won’t be going full speed.

Reducing the DPI will increase the speed it can go, or you could look into a 32 bit GRBL compatible controller.

1 Like

Curious did you do any changes in the Shape Properties for this photo?