Prepping Photos-Acrylic, Marble, Granite & Anodized Aluminum

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:

1. Import your photo into your artistic software (i.e. Corel, Photoshop, Gimp, etc)
2. RESAMPLE it to the size you want and make your resolution 300 dpi
3. Convert the image to grayscale
4. Invert the image
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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.
8. 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
9. Once you are happy with it, send it to the laser software.
10. If you have an Epilog, continue to step 15, for those who have RDWorks or any other software, continue on to the next step
11. Go to Mode, Black and White, Jarvis dithering, 100% intensity
12. Save it as a bitmap as black and white, dithered, with the dpi being the same as your pictures
13. 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
14. As far as settings go. For RDWorks Power min 12/Max14 200mm/s power at 300 DPI (.085 Variance)
15. 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: