Some one please help. When I try to burn this image the shadows on the deer do not fill in. I’
m sure I don’t have something set up right, but I haven’t been able to figure it out. Thank you
Making pictures on wood with a diode laser in Grayscale mode is difficult:
A Grayscale image maps the entire dynamic range of the image between the Max and Min power levels, so those should be 100% and 0%, respectively, to get the widest power range from the laser.
You will probably get better visual results from any of the other Image modes.
Diode lasers typically use speed units of mm/minute speed units, rather than mm/second. A speed of 6000 mm/s may be too too fast to fully char the wood, particularly at less than 100% of the laser’s power.
Practice on cardboard until you have a good idea of the differences!
Aaron
As Ednisley stated above and to add, you will get better results at this point by using Stuki, Jarvis or Dither.
I’m also using a snap maker (Ray 20w and 2wIR).
Lucky you were using high speed because 75% power is a lot. Try 3000mm/min with 20% power and go from there.
You may be thinking…as I did, that Greyscale and High Dpi will give great detail but try setting your Dpi to 204 and see how well it will work as a wider Lpi will allow you to apply a bit more Power to get a darker burn (if the material requires it) without the burn spots overlapping which causes less subtle shading. A higher Lpi will also help shorten job time…a little.
It’s actually the other way around. More lines per inch means it’s going to take more passes per inch, so it will take longer.
Most lasers either make a mark or not on the material, much like a printing press operates. So using a dither rather than a grayscale is likely to turn out better with less effort.
A normal grayscale starts at white and goes to black, however the machine can’t really reproduce it as at the low end, there isn’t enough power to mark and at the high end, there’s generally too much.
The only way a grayscale really works well is to constrain it’s range to something you can reproduce on your laser. The difference between where it marks at all and when it’s black is your working range, which is likely rather small.
It’s not that you can’t do it, but it pretty time consuming and turns a lot of material into scrap.
The effect is really the material/laser combination. A diode handles this differently than a co2. With a co2, it’s usually depth you’re doing, with an led, it’s more like a photo, at least that’s the theory. 
Good luck.
2 Likes
I stand reasonably corrected…Thank you Sir.
1 Like