First crack at photo engraving wood on a Universal laser

[Keith Colson]

I thought I would try my hand at photo engraving during Christmas break. Man there are a lot of settings and ways to do it. I think I have a reasonable system now. Note that this is really cheap pine plywood so it has a lot of cracky wood features but they are not too bad. Here are the pics. If you have a method that works with Universal lasers I am keen to hear it. I even tried 3d engraving. After a long calibration it darken the wood really well and was fast but is really sensitive to power fluctuations.

marilyn_sm.JPG

lambo_sm.jpg

marilyn_closeup_sm.jpg

Cheers
Keith

[Bernie Fraser]

I like it Keith, good work far better than my attempts. I may have to have another crack it now after seeing your results. On my attempt I could not even make out an image.

On another note I have worked alongside a few Kiwis and they have been a good bunch. Always love watching the Haka, brilliant.

[Bert Kemp]

Looks pretty good, I'm going to have to try that sometime.

[Brent Franker]

Looks good! Do you mind sharing how/if you edited the photos in any manner and what programs you used to do so? Thanks!

[Junior hall]

Wow i am jealous I can not wait to get my laser tube 60 watt laser tube so i can get back to practising. I am wanting to do photo laser so bad i can tast it.

I know when i first got my laser machine i tried every thing on pinewood and then some oak finish boiy oh boy can tell the difference Just got to get the lines going the right way

Looks good to me Congratulations

[Keith Colson]

Thanks for the feedback, here is the process that I am doing for my VLS6.60

1) Paste a bitmap into Coreldraw
2) Convert to Mode - 8 bit greyscale. This means memory usage will be much smaller so steps after this will be faster as a result
3) Do a bitmap - auto adjust. This expands the image to go from full black to full white which makes for a consistent starting point for different image types.
4) Set the image size to match the physical size you wish to use
5) Set the DPI to something around 200 to 300 dpi. e.g. Bitmap - Resample.
6) Now click effects - Tone curve. This where we compress the image to remove the extreme darks and a little of the light area. Use the curve option and set the curve as shown. 180 min with a curve to knock some extreme whites off.
tone_curve.PNG

7)Print to ULS driver with the following options in the raster tab.
Print quality 3 seems to be a happy medium
Special effects - Normal
Dithering - Error diffusion
Image enhancement - Disabled
Power 60% and 20% speed for plywood. Going faster does not get a nice dark burn for me.
Power 90% and 20% speed for MDF

Now if you had a different laser cutter you might convert it to stucki etc before printing. I don't do this because the resolution may not come out native. This is where you need to understand "your machine". The ULS software converts to a native resolution automatically via the error diffusion algorithm.

Feedback would be appreciated. This is my first go so it does not make it the right way to do it but my results seem pretty consistent from picture to picture.

I noticed that images with very light backgrounds seem to give the best results. Good luck

Cheers
Keith

[Brent Franker]

Thanks, Keith! I have a program that is supposed to do a good job with photos on wood but it is good to have that excellent bit of info you posted to experiment doing it manually in Corel Thanks!

[Keith Colson]

I did some more photo engraving today. I have worked out that if the "eyes" come out good usually the rest of the image will be good. If one eye is in shadow and one eye is not its really hard to get a good result. I got some great results from one piece of MDF and another piece came out terrible. I think it is because one peice was really dry from the hot garage which work perfectly while the other piece had been stored inside and was more moist.The failed peice has random black splotches that appeared.

I think if I am to do this for customers I will need to charge well as every "wood" job is a bit of an experiment. I need to try some other woods next.

Cheers
Keith

[Scott Shepherd]

I think if I am to do this for customers I will need to charge well as every "wood" job is a bit of an experiment. I need to try some other woods next.

Cheers
Keith

Now you know why most of us that have been doing it a while don't offer the services.