Baltic Birch - How to darken engraved areas on Baltic Birch

[Scott Shepherd]

I'm with Gary and Mike. Outstanding work Don! Best I've ever seen on wood. Well done!

[Keith Winter]

Looks great Don!

[Don Corbeil]

Thanks everyone. Coming from the pros on this forum, it means a lot

[Matt McCoy]

Great work Don.

[Randy Riley]

Nice Work.
May I ask are you using a photo editing software?

[Hannu Rinne]

Hi Don,

Your results are magnificent. I haven't never got as fabulous results with the dog images as yours are. A couple years ago I made this on to birch veneer, which (I guess) gives a little darker mark than a raw birch. This is a 300 dpi image and I ran it through Photograv before engraving.

Regards,
Hannu

[Don Corbeil]

Thanks Matt & Randy.
Randy, I only use photograv. The one thing I would add is that I really have to work with customers in procuring good quality images. The old saying, 'garbage in, garbage out' rings true if I cannot get my hands on a good image to start with.


edit: that looks very good, hannu

[Klaus Madsen]

I have experimented with this a lot and I'm still not (always) satisfied, but I also found that the only way to get darker result was as someone else wrote go low and slow.

[Kev Williams]

Wood is always a crap shoot. The only exception I've found is Alder...

Had a customer bring me some 1/8" baltic birch 2 weeks ago to make a 5-piece 'milestone' award out of. Cut the the pieces, then laser 1" dollar amounts...
3 of the panels engraved nice & dark, 2 of them were about 50% lighter, almost no difference from the surface. Cut at and engraved at the same time in the Triumph.

Alder is the only wood I trust to engrave decent