I have a pic here and first used Dither and then redone with Stucki. What would someone recommend for a pic like this? It is actually a charcoal drawing with shades. But sometimes I may have a live pic of someone. For the Stucki Mode (the second pass) I used 3000mm/min with 50% burn. The wood in pine. I am looking for opinions also.
Probably including the photo would get you more input than showing the output you have without any details.
It looks like the grain of the wood burns unevenly and is working against you. I might try different wood.
I think tweaking the usual image processing (Gamma, Contrast, Brightness) parms should yield something on that wood. Yeah, the grain seems highlighted, but there should be more range of intensities in the burn. It looks too binary…