Hello,
First thing is that I am pretty new to Lightburn(and laser cutting), so that being said, here is my concern:
I can burn everything really well as long as it is only hard black, but as soon as i try to burn greyscale it just come out as hard black. What i did so far is to Import an image into LightBurn and, in the cut settings, tried to burn with the mode set to Dither, Jarvis, Stucki and Greyscale, but without success. Tried with many different speed and power between 1000/20 to 3000/40 on wood and leather.
I am not sure where to look at from here, so all help is welcome.
Got mine last week(March 2021). Yes the laser work and I am able to engrave, but grayscale are never working, there is no “tint” beside black, seem like it doesn’t ajust its power by itself when burning grayer color. Also it looks like reducing the power manually, when defining the cut settings, is also working.
This is only true for CO2 lasers. Diodes work quite well with grayscale, though it can be a pain to dial in the right power curve for a given material.
Here are the files that I tried and the results(I am sorry but i don’t remember the exact settings I used for each files). Tried on both wood and leather with similar results.
I think I’m going to let diode users find their own way from now on - so many repeated questions, buggy electronics, sub-par hardware - it’s like Groundhog Day
Something that probably confuse me is that when I look at the “preview” its also all black, there is no degree from gray to black(I’ve seen that in some LightBurn tutorial video). Strangely my tests look better in photo than in real-life… I’m clueless, hehe!
The preview just shows where the laser is on or off, it does not shade according to power. Using the dither, stucki, newsprint, etc does not vary the laser power, its just on at your max power setting for the cut layer or off. the software varies the shading by varying the length or density of the dots it burns.
If you zoom in more closely in the preview you can see more clearly how this works.
Greyscale is different in that the laser is on the whole time and the software varies the power (Between your min and max power level for the layer) depending on how dark the image is. The prieview just shows all black because the laser is on the whole time.
Thank you for all these informations, I guess that we all have to be newbie at some point! I’ll keep RTFM, watch some videos and do more experimentations.
If you click the ‘Shade According to Power’ button on the preview it helps, but it’s not going to show you what the final burn looks like - it’s really only intended to show you the path the laser is going to take for the job so you can verify that. It’s not attempting to simulate the output, because every material responds differently.