Unsure how to improve this picture quality

[Shiver.Woodworks]

Morning Everyone! I’m hoping some of the more experienced photo engravers can tell me where i’m going wrong… I had someone commission an engraving of a drawing they had created for their wife. I’ve gone through about 12 different full image burns (roughly 8.5 x 11 @ 7+ hours each) and none of them have turned out great.

here is my original image:

I’m burning onto silver maple with a JTECH 7W diode laser. i ended up creating some sample boards to try and dial in my settings…

i settled on 320dpi, 30 In/m, Pwr 40% (power scaled down from 100% in the shape properties), jarvis dithering. Here’s what i got (this is with a wipe of mineral spirits to simulate finish):

I’m so far down into the weeds of this project i have no clue how to make this look cleaner without loosing detail. the face is the worst part to me. would love some help and will be willing to send out beers as a thanks!

[Ashkan4818 (Ashkan)]

see this vedio :

Photo Engraving Wood | Tonal Curve Feature in CorelDraw

[Shiver.Woodworks]

Awesome, I used Photoshop to mess with the tonal curves and the unsharpening. Have another test run going now. Will post an update soon. Thank you!

[Shiver.Woodworks]

I’ll try 254 dpi next, thanks!

[LightBurn (Oz)]

In Shape Properties, try dropping the Gamma value to 0.7 - that will help bring some of the mid-grays up, but leaves whites and blacks alone.

[Shiver.Woodworks]

Definitely made some good progress! Here’s how it looked after doing the first adjustment to the tonal curve and unsharpening it.

not bad at all

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The ones below are after doing some more tonal curve adjustment, more unsharpening, dropping the DPI to 254, and adjusting the gamma to .7… but i forgot and left the power at 100% since i started a new project lol. still. not bad! reducing to 70% and will try again since i like the darkness and just want to keep a few more details.

[Ashkan4818 (Ashkan)]

Well done