WMF will it Engrave or Raster correctly?

[Bill George]

Trying to do a job using the company logo and the people who want it done are clueless... almost anyway. The best logo they could get me was a WMF and it Imports into Corel X6 fine and looks super. I added the required Text they wanted and then converted the WMF into my standard 300 dpi B&W bitmap. It all looks great on the screen but when I Engrave or Raster to LaserMark aluminum gold the large logo has some hard to see banding in certain areas. The text I added looks great. No banding.

My question can I just leave it as a WMF and will it work or work better?
Using a ULS 50 watt machine.

[Kev Williams]

I don't think it's the file--
Yesterday I was having issues engraving Darth Vader's tie-fighter onto some black leather. Vertical banding was one of the issue's, and detail was muddy--
I also was using a 300 dpi bitmap conversion of a nice grayscale photo. A few different laser settings didn't seem to change much.

So for kicks I re-converted the pic to a 200 dpi bitmap-- and it turned out great! I've always been hesitant to go down in dpi but it worked!

[Bill George]

Kev, I think I will try your idea tomorrow. I did some searching on this before posting and Dan had a few posts about the DPI and banding. The deal is I really don't know about the WMF file and the resolution issue?

[Ross Moshinsky]

In general, I convert just about everything to vector art. $20 charge and I either do a conversion myself or send it out to "my guy" to do it. I'm also a big believer in converting logos to be "engravable". If you have some crazy logo that was designed for color printing, I'm likely going to recommend simplifying it so it can be engraved well. A good logo shouldn't be designed for print only.

[Bill George]

Russ I converted to a BMP but I think its a resolution issue. I will try again this morning.

[Tony Lenkic]

Bill,

Is the logo black/white or shades of grey?
I see no reason to convert the file to BMP. Just save it as CDR and when printing to ULS driver pick appropriate built in mode.

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

In general, I convert just about everything to vector art.

If the .wmf looked good, chances are it was already in vector format.
.wmf files can contain both vector and bitmap graphics.

[Brian Leavitt]

In general, I convert just about everything to vector art. $20 charge and I either do a conversion myself or send it out to "my guy" to do it. I'm also a big believer in converting logos to be "engravable". If you have some crazy logo that was designed for color printing, I'm likely going to recommend simplifying it so it can be engraved well. A good logo shouldn't be designed for print only.
Agree 100%, and pretty much mirrors what we do here.

[Bill George]

Well I changed the resolution no help and tried the straight WMF straight not ok, maybe I am just to fussy. This is AlumaMark never did large black areas before, but what really helped.... took it maybe 1 or 2 mm higher on the Z to put out of focus. Gave acceptable results and the customer Oked, and more important I got a check!