Pricing Engraved photos

[Jim Dornon]

How does everyone price thier photos ?

[Vicky Orsini]

Material costs plus mark-up, laser time at a rate per minute, plus an hourly rate for editing/converting the photo. Whatever your hourly/per minute rates are is totally up to you. ;)

[Kevin Huffman]

I once saw a quote that said, "Say the highest price you can say with out laughing and if they don't fall over follow it with plus install." It was all about not leaving any money on the table. I have never really been a sales person so I haven't ever tried this so..........

Most of the time, my customers tell me they do at least 2x material cost, $60-$100 per laser hour and then the hourly design rate is depending on how hard the job is.

Hope this helps some.

[Bill Cunningham]

It also depends on the material, and it's colour..If you have a 'good' photo, with 'good' contrast, and a 'good' resolution and once your used to working with photos, and photograv, it only takes minutes to prepare the photo for engraving. Photos on black granite, black marble, or glass require a bit more work to remove or reverse the backgrounds for negative etching.. Wood is the easiest, and I usually charge a flat rate of $1.15 per sq inch, with a $30.00 minimum.. I never waste my time on a poor photo or one with little contrast, etching a low res. web .jpg, or a black suit against a black background.. Even if my customer would say Wow when looking at the final work, I'm not happy until 'I' say Wow.

[Jim Watkins]

Just a thought Bill,
@ $1.15 per sq. in., is not the DPI relavant? For the wood I use, I typically use 300 DPI.

In your experiecnce is that what you use and does it work well for you?

[Bill Cunningham]

Just a thought Bill,
@ $1.15 per sq. in., is not the DPI relavant? For the wood I use, I typically use 300 DPI.

In your experiecnce is that what you use and does it work well for you?

The dpi I use, depends on the photograph, and how much 'burn' I want in the final picture.. I use 600 dpi in a lot of work, and sometime two passes , particularly if I have a coat of laquer on the surface.. I usually play it by ear (eye?) when I see the converted photo. I like detail, and a dark burn so sometimes I'm a little heavy on the dpi overlap..
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=78543&d=1199415973http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=75319&d=1195358067

Then sometimes you get a older picture you would like to tone down a bit, so I lower the dpi, to lighten up the picture
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=75592&d=1195616643

And then you get some that have a lot of dark, and you just do the best you can...

[Jim Dornon]

Nice work bill, what are you using to convert the image. I do not have photograv, very tedious in photo paint. Still don't have it where I need it to be. Jim

[Bill Cunningham]

All of the above were done using photograv.. I find that some materials, such as cermark on stainless, marble, anodized alum., leather and laquered brass will all accept photos using a standard driver generated halftone.. If you have a Epilog, 300, or 600 dpi in clipart mode will work, the photograph mode will change the dither and also provide decent results. But not on wood or granite. for those you have to spend time creating a good binary file with photopaint, or use photograv.. If your doing this for profit, buy photograv, it will pay for itself in virtually no time..

The pictures below were all done using the driver halftone before I bought photograv.

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=71227&d=1188954357
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=55674&d=1169419768
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=53280&d=1166844556http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=51903&d=1165422300