engraving glass

[Marc Beaupre]

I know this topic has been beaten like a dead horse but would someone please give me some advise?
I am trying to engrave this photo on glass using corel draw X5, 60watt jamieson laser, lasercut 5.3.
The image comes out very sharp with little detail or very detailed but little contrast. Playing with contrast
and gamma has been random and I think my frustration is in this randomness.

Thanks Marc

[Joe Pelonio]

Photos do not lend themselves to glass without a lot of effort, and without good contrast as in your photo it's going to be frustrating. Except for that bit of sky and left edge white hair, there is very little contrast. You can work on it using Photopaint or photoshop or another program to increase the contrast, but then try it on clear acrylic first until you have it the best you can get it before trying on glass.

[Bill Cunningham]

A quick tip for animals on glass, or anything for that matter.. Animal fur does not reflect light like human hair. Once you have adjusted the contrast and are satisfied with the image, you want to add a little 'emboss effect' to the image. this will put a little definition on the fur and give it a bit of detail. Then use photograv/gold method/or equiv. to convert it to a monochrome negative image before engraving. People and creatures without fur are much easier to etch..

[Marc Beaupre]

Thanks for the help, I have tried everything I can think of to enhance this photo but the engraving just isn't satisfactory.
I guess sometimes you just have to tell the customer, "it can't be done".

[Scott Shepherd]

Marc, I don't know the original photo quality or size, but in looking at the photo, my belief is that glass likes images to be fairly muted. If you have solid black or white areas, they are going to be a problem. You wouldn't look at a photo that was ready to engrave and think "That's a great photo". You'd probably say "That looks really flat" instead. You want to bring up the blacks and bring down the whites. You don't want strong contrast, in my opinion.

Without seeing the original photo or knowing the number of pixels in the X and Y, I can't tell you if it's doable or not, but if those are okay, then you can probably make something work, but you'll need to be working on the photo in a photo editing package to get rid of those dark blacks and the bright whites.

Just my opinion.

[Amos De Pasquale]

Marc here is the image in GreyScale with a little doctoring, I tried to attach the Bitmap image but was not successful, If you PM me with your email. I will send all the images. Amos:)256016