A customer ordered an LED acrylic lamp and wants this photo collage engraved. The photos aren’t the greatest quality and I’ve tweaked it several times to try to get the photos engraved. My sister says it’s because it’s a collage that makes it difficult. I honestly think it’s the actual photos and not the fact that it’s a collage. Anybody can help me please? I’ve been trying to figure this out for 3 days now and I’d hate to spend a week on something that shouldn’t take a week to work on. I have all of the photos individually if that needs to be done to get this properly engraved for the lamp. Thanks!
Yeah this!
So there has been a lot of talk about how to make a good photo engrave, it’s a mix of the right settings and the right image processing.
So, first things first, you want this to be an acrylic lamp, are you engraving directly on the acrylic, like the side-lit type of lamp here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1142941996/acrylic-led-lamp-valentine-gift-1-3d-led
Let us know a bit more about what you’re up to and we’ll go from there.
Also, welcome back! Don’t be such a stranger! 
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Agree with above. There is no way you are going to get satisfactory results using common settings for the whole thing. They are going to need to be broken up and engraved individually.
There are some images in that collage that I wouldn’t even dream of trying to engrave, the effort to edit them would just be too much work.
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Yes, I am trying to engrave on the clear acrylic like in those lamps on etsy. I did play around with the settings of the photo individually. My sister changed them in photoshop. We got a bit of the details showing on two or three of the photos, but they still were not as good as they could be.
Would you say it’d be better to just sublimate rather than engrave these photos onto the acrylic? That was my next option, and I was thinking of bringing it up to the person who placed this order with me.
I can’t speak to sublimation, but it seems to me it would be a lot less effort to simply have a regular photographic print made and throw it in a frame.
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In my opinion, edge-lit acrylic is great for simple graphics and line art. It’s a lot harder to get anything good from a photo.
I took a look around for some samples, and… this is not intended to bash anybody, it’s just about the level of detail most photos are going to produce. Basically, mud.
I saw one seller who seems to have developed a high level of skill for converting photos. I suspect they have years of practice and an eye for it, and it’s probably quite a bit of manual work to get these results:
Their one example of an acrylic lamp with the dog image shows that it can be done when the photo is large and can be simplified to just a few shades represented through dithering. And again I think there was a good amount of hand work there, not just tweaking the contrast in photoshop.
A lot of words to say I agree that photo collage is probably not going to lend itself to becoming an acrylic engrave.
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