Any advice for etching a picture in wood?

[Andy Joe]

I have a job to etch a picture of two boys into wood. I got the job off of the customer looking at what i did on marble, Im not at all sure of what i need to do to the pic to get it to come out like it does on marble. I have made a few modifications and gave a test run on sample wood and it looked horrible, i either get the skin to show and everything else to be so dark its no longer a surface etching, or the shirts show up fine but its just a set of floating eyes with a mouth for the head. Im attaching the pic, if anyone can help i would love to hear any advice

[Tom Bull]

What wood/finish are you engraving? When worse comes to worse you can use Photo Paint to mask areas and adjust the brightness-contrast in specific parts of a photo. Had to do that recently with a wedding photo that didn't have good tonal range.

[Andy Joe]

useing maple that was been glued together to make a head board. I will trying the masking trick. thanks

[Dan Hintz]

Also, be aware that you are not going to get nearly the same resolution you did with marble. Figure something in the 200dpi range is about right for a really tight grain wood, possibly closer to 125-150dpi for an open grain...

[Frank Corker]

Try this attached file and see how it looks. Just do the normal settings for wood and see how you get on. I processed the image through photograv so it might be a little better. I had to darken the clothing on the boy in the dark shirt because that was very blotchy mainly because the picture has been overworked. If you are still having problems you can pm me and I will see if I can do better from the original pictures.

[Andy Joe]

worked perfect thanks

[Frank Corker]

......Cool

[Dee Gallo]

You always are, Frank!

:) dee

[Frank Corker]

That's nice to hear Andy. I'm glad it did the trick.

[Andy Joe]

It worked great Franks, thanks a ton. You helped me out alot. Thought you might like to know the guys reaction was to cry when he seen the peice. So im beating you made his day tooo!!!!!