Not at all. Just means you need to facter in that you may be dealing with a moving target.
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Life is a moving target. Successful people reanalyze, adapt, and overcome. IMHO, attitudes like that expressed in the post above are why there is such a paltry amount of useful settings info here. It also assumes that the GF people know all there is to know about this topic, and can’t possibly learn something from users here that might feed into a future version of the software. That’s obviously not the case.
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That’s the thing, engineers tend to be very good at reading numerical data but not so good at reading other peoples attitudes. I don’t think he was saying “don’t even bother”. I for one appreciate your efforts.
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I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. Stay tuned - I have a useful Photoshop technique to share in a few minutes here.
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Right, but several times bitten twice shy or something like that.
It wasn’t an attitude, it was an observation. IMHO I had to read further in the comments to find an attitude.
Have a nice day.
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Ok, here are some results, and a useful photo processing technique to improve results.
This photo is my baseline:
From the original, it has been converveted to grayscale and sharpened to bring out detail. I did three engraves based on this:
- Default proofgrade settings.
- Optimal settings determined from my analysis at the top of the thread.This was Speed: 600, LPI: 450, “Power”: 30%, Grayscale: “Convert to Dots”, Pattern Density: [0 - 60].
- Optimal settings, but with an additional adjustment to the photo (describe below).
Here are those results:
I think you will agree that the 3rd engraving is the best, and much closer to the original photo. The detail in the eye and whiskers area, is much better, and the overall engraving is more natural looking and with an exposure matching the original. Given the determination that there is less dynamic range in the darks, I used Photoshop’s Curves feature to compensate for that. Here is a screenshot of the Curves adjustment panel:
So, I’m off to use this technique and re-print some previously botched engravings.
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Nice results and thanks for the tip.
Very nice! I’ll try that curve in my next photo engrave. I use GIMP and Corel products but the curve, though probably called something else and under another menu should come out the same.
Check out @takitus post in the other thread - he has a curve that emphasizes mid-ranges. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like it adds contrast, so I suspect it will help bring out detail better than my approach.
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What great work! We aren’t satisfied with the photo PG defaults either, and are working on more improvements.
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THANK YOU so much! This was exactly the information I was looking for. Again, TY!
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You are welcome. Please share your findings/results - especially if you are engraving on any other materials.
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Wonderful info. Thanks for doing all the research and providing it in a standard manner.
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You’re most welcome. I’m glad you find it useful.
Thank you so much for putting these settings out ther and for all of those who added to them in the comments! This is my first attempt at a picture, did it on med maple ply scrap before I put it on the final piece. I think the settings turned out great! Thanks again!
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Hi kathy. I am glad that the information was useful. Your engraving came out great!
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What improvements were you guys able to come up with and implement in the last 2 years for the photo pg defaults? I curious as I’ve found that the majority of the PG defaults (especially the cuts) are far off mark and dont actually cut. I was hoping to get some insight into the improvements made in engraves?
If this is the case you should be opening a ticket with support and posting pictures - the PG should (and does for the majority of machines) cut/engrave/score perfectly every time. People have found that if they let their machines get dirty they sometimes have to lower the speed or raise the power slightly to address it - but those are heavy users.
If you want to read about all the improvements you can do a search for Dan’s tag’s and “Discussion of” in the Everything Else category (Search results for '@dan #everything-else "discussion of" order:latest_topic' - Glowforge Owners Forum) you’ll have hours of great reading ahead of you! Sadly AFAIK you can’t sort from oldest topic so you’ll either have to scroll down until it stops filling, or request it to only show you ones from 2017 first, then 18, etc.
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If you want the best “unretouched” photo engraves, I find the Draft Photo setting to give the best results.
If you want to take it a step further and get really professional looking results, it can require making a few quick tweaks to the photo for contrast first. Glowforge has a guide for doing that here for Photoshop and here for GIMP.
(And there are simple plugins for sale that are used by the Pros to prep their photos in Photoshop. Fabulous results…just send a PM to @jbmanning5 and ask about it. I bought it, and I love it.)
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