Photo engraving on acrylic8

Finished Creations
1

I finally got around to experimenting with photo engraving on acrylic, but I’m looking for any advice anyone would care to impart. I have an 80W CO2 with Lightburn of course. I found a random photo from my files taken with my camera phone. I did my best to adjust the image using the Shape Properties tool and took a guess at the speed, power, dpi and method (Jarvis, Dither, etc.)

I was quite impressed with my first attempt, but it must have been luck because following attempts at improvement were only worse, until the last few when I finally was making improvements. Spent about half a day on it. I’m slightly happy, but I have a couple more ideas to make it better. Was thinking of reducing the contrast and increasing the brightness a tad.

Any suggestions are appreciated, but I guess my main question is; once you get acceptable settings for a given photo, how much experimenting is needed for a different photo? Or, once I find my best settings, will they be pretty close for more photos I want to do in the future? Or, will they always require hours of set up time and experimentation to get another photo right? I mean, do you always start from square one with every new photo?

This one is on 1/4" cast acrylic with black paint on the back, then back filled with white after the engrave.

I’m at 250mm/second, about 10% max power. 2" meniscus lens.

20210102_214927
20210102_2149272762×2072 2.92 MB

Thank you for any comments.

2

nice, will have to try that someday.

Bob

3

Well, follow up to my own post. I made about a dozen more attempts today on this image trying to zero in on the best settings and in think I got it about as good as I can get it. The light areas need to be darker and the dark areas need to be lighter, but the result is less contrast which doesn’t seem to work very well. I think what seems to have the biggest effect on the outcome is simply the power setting. Well, here’s my best. It’s probably not a great image to use as an example because I scaled it down so much, so maybe images I produce in the future will be better if they are larger.

20210103_191640
20210103_1916404032×2268 3.08 MB

4

looks great to me, been trying to find a way to engrave a pic of my dog, he’s black and white and nothing worked so thank you for the tip :+1: :+1:

5

I was asking for tips, not intending to give tips, so glad to help! :slight_smile:

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