We are lasering bases for trophies and the machine is lasering these tiny blue dots around the letters and logo. I saved the image as a jpeg and when I loaded it, the picture was very clear. I even tried as a PDF but the logo and the writing were all a big blur. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I have not been able to reach anyone at Glowforge.
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Welcome to the community. I’m sorry to say, but GF support won’t be of any help with this issue. It’s your file that’s the problem.
Oftentimes, jpegs come with unwanted artifacts…which is what all the tiny dots are. It’s necessary to clean files like that up before trying to engrave them. A PDF is a container file…which just means that you put the ‘dirty’ image into a container before loading it into the UI.
My suggestion would be to remove the background from the logo itself, then add the words separately in the font of your choice. Trying to do that entire thing as a jpeg isn’t going to produce good results. As you can see, there are dots all around your lettering, as well.
Best of luck to you.
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Thank you for your quick response. We have another laser machine that we have used for 9 years. We purchased a second machine thinking it would help production. I have always created the jobs in Corel Draw and exported as a jpeg. I’ve never seen this happen. It seems like a lot of time messing around with the logo. That one came as a vector from the client. Is there another format that would be better?
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The JPG format is by nature lossy and compressed. No matter how clean you try to export or how high the settings there will ALWAYS be some artifacting. Try exporting PNG instead for a raster format, SVG or PDF if you want to stay vector.
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It will always happen with a JPG, as that is how it compresses an image. What I have found, however, is that the odd pixels are usually near the value of the surrounding pixels, and increasing the contrast will make them go away. It is just a matter of how much to increase the contrast. But after that, it needs to be a PNG.
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If you converted the vector to JPEG, the conversion itself introduced those artifacts.
You can often reduce them by bumping up the quality of the conversion/export, but to prevent them completely, you need an uncompressed/loss-less file format.
The reason you don’t see them on your other machine is likely due to different settings or a mechanical/electronic difference in the way the machines work.
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Ok just wanted to let you know I saved as a GIF and it is perfect!!! Thank you for all your quick responses.
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Very much not ideal. What gets by this time, and what actually works properly is different.
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GIF is perfect, imo. Uses the old LZH compression which is loss-less.
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GIF is a lossless format so it won’t introduce artifacts the way JPEG does. GIF should work just fine for this.
The main problem with GIF is its low color depth, but for black and white image that’s fine.
That being said, I would generally recommend PNG. It’s a more convenient format all around (better software support, much better compression, etc.) but for this application GIF will work fine.
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