Help with Photos?

[Vicki Rivers]

I've been reading your forum for a long time, but never have much to input, as we are still new to this.

We're doing pretty good with most things, but photos are really doing poorly. I see all this cool stuff people have done, but mine come out like a blob.

I've used regular Corel Draw. It didn't work.
I used One Touch Photo on the Universal. That didn't work.
We've used PhotoGrav....that didn't work.

We can get really good pictures of people usually...but animals are completely out.

What are we doing wrong?? I've attached a couple pictures of an animal...i've seen what you guys have done so I KNOW it can be done. When I tried asking the people who sold us the lasers, they just say "oh some things just won't work"

So is there any suggestions someone can give?

Right now I make it 300 DPI for the picture, and we've ran them at 300 and 600. Do the grayscale first. Various speeds/power...still, it doesn't come out.

We have an epilog 50W laser and a universal 60W laser. Laser beam itself is .005

Misch May 2010.jpgrevised eagle white background.jpg

[Larry Bratton]

Vicki:
First of all..welcome to SMC. I see this is your second post. Lots of help here.
You don't say what your trying to engrave these photos on. The white dog is a good subject for engraving on something black, such as black granite or marble. As far as that particular photo goes, I would remove the background, especially all the vegetation behind the dog. However, I suggest you do a search on here for photos etc. This subject has been discussed over and over and you should find plenty of good reading. Unfortunately there is not a "one size fits all" solution to your query.

[Chris DeGerolamo]

What material(s) are you trying to engrave? I little more insight would help. 600 DPI is high for engraving onto marble or granite - we use 300 (and 100 speed and 30 power on our 35 Watt Epilog) and results are good. What power settings have you tried? This may be a dumb question but are you inverting the color in the image after you grayscale it?

[Dan Hintz]

A picture of the problem would help immensely...

[Vicki Rivers]

Hi Larry and everyone else I read this forum all the time, but still struggle. I'd love to post more but I don't have any good ideas to give back to people so I stay quiet.

We are trying to engrave on wood, leather, and tile. All colors of tile.

I am getting a picture of the dog eyes, I don't have it yet but hopefully Saturday I will. I had my dad run it on the machine, but his net is down so he can't send it to me.

I am attaching a picture of the dog on the grass. When we tried to engrave it on wood, his eyes and nose came out, but nothing else. it's like the body just disappeared. So then we ran it out of focus, and this is what we came out with, which is better than anything else I could get. I'm also attaching a picture of a dog face, the face itself turned out just ok, but the rest of him didn't even engrave on the board.

We are engraving on wood (for this purpose baltic birch). Using settings of 100 power, 43 speed. I have not tried inverting, I didn't think we needed to invert unless it's on black.

Misch wood.JPGCosmo Wood.JPG

[oscar martinez]

On my opinion the dog is white. Try to removed the background like Larry said the plants etc. and create a dark contour around the dog because the main thing is the dog not the plants also you can play a little bit wit gamma or contrast on gray scale that will increase more dark details to engrave because the dog is white, you said you have photo grav read on your manual about it. some times is dificult to explain here, is like engraving a dalmatian dog you will obtain spots of the dog unless you have a good back ground in contrast of white.The engraving of the dog is not to bad.
Atte Oscar
from the Golden State

[Larry Bratton]

Hi Larry and everyone else I read this forum all the time, but still struggle. I'd love to post more but I don't have any good ideas to give back to people so I stay quiet.

We are trying to engrave on wood, leather, and tile. All colors of tile.

I am getting a picture of the dog eyes, I don't have it yet but hopefully Saturday I will. I had my dad run it on the machine, but his net is down so he can't send it to me.

I am attaching a picture of the dog on the grass. When we tried to engrave it on wood, his eyes and nose came out, but nothing else. it's like the body just disappeared. So then we ran it out of focus, and this is what we came out with, which is better than anything else I could get. I'm also attaching a picture of a dog face, the face itself turned out just ok, but the rest of him didn't even engrave on the board.

We are engraving on wood (for this purpose baltic birch). Using settings of 100 power, 43 speed. I have not tried inverting, I didn't think we needed to invert unless it's on black.

Misch wood.JPGCosmo Wood.JPG

I notice your machine is an Epilog. Assuming you are using the Dashboard driver, you can try different dithering patterns before you send the greyscale image to the machine. The default in the driver is Standard but you have other choices in the drop down. I would suggest trying them all to see what you get with each. I use Floyd Steinburg and Jarvis a good bit. You see, the Epilog takes that greyscale image and coverts it to 1 bit, black and white to process it. One bit images use dithering,a pattern of dots to reproduce your image. Same thing happens when you use Photograv to convert the image, some people like it, some don't. I personally process my photos in Corel Photopaint and convert them to 1 bit Black and White there and choose a dithering pattern at that time. Also, if you process your photo at 300dpi, stick with that in your Epilog driver when you send it to the laser (in your print setup for the file).
(Edit) I also notice you are are using Baltic Birch- plywood? If your using plywood, that might be part of your problem. Are you by any chance lasering through the top layer of the veneer?

[Dan Hintz]

You have a major contrast problem. This is not something that can be solved with adjusting contrast with the picture as a whole, you will need to mask and adjust various areas differing amounts.

[Bill Cunningham]

Here's a tip to make your 'animal' photo's 'pop' .. Animal fur does not reflect light like human hair does, so you have to give it an 'edge' When processing your photo convert to greyscale, use the 3d 'Emboss'. Only set the emboss to 1-4 pixels depending on the photo, and generally tweak it till it looks good to your eye.. this will take some practice. Then process it with photograv and use the cherry setting (there is only one).. Then engrave.. Do not change the size of the photo after running it through PG.. The image you uploaded, is only a low res image so this will not work all that well on that image. I won't work on a wood image less than 300 dpi if I don't have to,, The lower the input res the poorer this results....
Engrave this, and see it it works any better (it may not because the source is far from optimal)

Dog-eng.bmp

[Vicki Rivers]

Larry,

We are using the baltic birch because it was recommended somewhere on the forums here, due to the light color. I don't know for sure whether or not we are going through the veneer.
I prefer to use the Epilog laser, my dad prefers to use the Universal Laser.
What I've been doing with the photo grav is converting it to 300 DPI grayscale, and putting it in the size I want. Then I open up Photograv, select Baltic birch (Which I've just discovered I should use Cherry instead!) and hit process. Then transfer it back as the TIF image and hit print. Printing either 300 or 600.

Dan, I wasn't aware I could change the image contract of just sections....that is really cool. I will have to figure out how to do that in Corel, thank you. We use Corel Draw X4.

Oscar, the dog on the left we accomplished by running the laser out of focus, putting the beam close to the wood instead of far away.

Bill, thank you. Animals are way harder than people, I've done a couple of people and they turned out okay. When we ran them through 1Touch, they were really crappy but using the same thing through PhotoGrav they turned out as the picture I'm attaching. This is the best one I've done. I'll try out the 3D Emboss deal and see how that works. And I'll try running the engraving through you sent and see how that comes out...Would you still use 100 power 43 speed on the Universal for this as well? i think if I could see how pictures should look before they engraved, I could figure it out...so it's definitely going to take some time to get to that point!

Amy Boy.JPG

[Vicki Rivers]

Here is the full photo of the dog, you can see what it looked like. We tried to engrave the whole thing but only the head came out at all.cosmo.jpg

[Larry Bratton]

"What I've been doing with the photo grav is converting it to 300 DPI grayscale, and putting it in the size I want. Then I open up Photograv, select Baltic birch (Which I've just discovered I should use Cherry instead!) and hit process. Then transfer it back as the TIF image and hit print. Printing either 300 or 600."

If you processed it at 300, you should print at 300. Once you get it into Corel, don't resize it. Once processed by Photograv, you don't worry about dithering, PG has returned a black and white, 1 bit image that has been dithered and is ready to print. Now you say you have been "converting it to 300 DPI grayscale". How exactly are you doing that? Are you scanning the image from a hard copy photo or are you downloading something of lesser resolution and res ing it up with the software? You need to start with a 300dpi image that you have acquired by a scan or other means. Digital camera settings have to be adjusted also to produce what you need .

[Scott Shepherd]

Vicki, I agree with Dan, the contrast on that dog is all wrong. In my opinion, when engraving photos, is that the laser doesn't like what the eye likes. You have to make contrast adjustments that look wrong to the eye, but the laser really likes. The laser doesn't do well with huge contrasts, for example, a bride in a white dress and the groom in a black tux. It just can't handle it because of what it's doing. One person will be "blown out" where it engraves everything like mad, and the other person will be not engraved at all (their clothes). You have to "flatten" the images out so they don't have a wide swing from one extreme to the other. In the dog photo, his face is blown out, his eyes and nose are solid black. In my opinion, you need to tone down the dog's head, and then bring up the brightness for it's body. Make it more of an even tone, across the entire dog.

Just make sure you do all that with a copy of the original, as anything you do will overwrite the original.

Just my two cents

[Dan Hintz]

Looking at that original image... there's not nearly as much detail as one would like to me a good picture, it's too blurred and grainy. You will have to use a heavy-handed sharpen tool to get the hair to stand out any, but unless you're careful with the masking the rest of the dog will look too sharp. It's just not a good image to work with if you want any detail.

[Luke Phillips]

Misch%20May%202010 copy (SIM).jpg

cosmo copy (SIM).jpg

Vicki - is this what you're looking for?