Prepping Photos-Acrylic, Marble, Granite & Anodized Aluminum
With the legendary Marc Stipo
Struggling with lasing images Acrylic, Marble, Granite, and Anodized Aluminum? Well here is a class to help you with those pesky substrates.
Here is a cheat sheet for you to refer to instead of having to go through the whole lecture again:
Remember: Balance is KEY. Unless you WANT to have major extremes in your engrave, some people may, however in photographs, this is not usually preferable:
- Import your photo into your artistic software (i.e. Corel, Photoshop, Gimp, etc)
- RESAMPLE it to the size you want and make your resolution 300 dpi
- Convert the image to grayscale
- Invert the image
- If there is too much extreme variation when it comes to really dark spots and really light spots, use the following tools to help balance it out
- Tone Curve: Use this option first, and only adjust it a little at a time. You can try to use auto tone. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. Get familiar with Ctrl+Z. It will always undo the last thing you did
- Contrast/Intensity/Brightness: This is the second tool to use. Be careful here though. They tend to work against each other. Use them a little at a time to get your desired balanced photo.
- Gamma: didn’t really elaborate on this one, but gamma will lighten or darken your photo almost the same as Tone Curve, except with a few minor differences
- Once you are happy with it, send it to the laser software.
- If you have an Epilog, continue to step 15, for those who have RDWorks or any other software, continue on to the next step
- Go to Mode, Black and White, Jarvis dithering, 100% intensity
- Save it as a bitmap as black and white, dithered, with the dpi being the same as your pictures
- On Acrylic, mirror the image because you want to engrave on the BACK of the acrylic to look through it at the image. Images are much better when looking through acrylic
- As far as settings go. For RDWorks Power min 12/Max14 200mm/s power at 300 DPI (.085 Variance)
- For Epilog users: 100speed/30% power, 300 DPI, Jarvis
Patience is key. Less is more in this area. Also throw a border around, like the vignette i showed, and try not to remove the background. It doesn’t look right.
Belois a link to the picture of the bridge. Try and get it to look like the one i did. I guarantee if you do, you will get a great picture.
Download The Bridge Picture Here: beg-prep-wood-intro-1.jpg
And make yours look like this: