I’m still not confident about what to do to photos to make them better engraving candidates; it all makes sense when I read what other people have done, but faced with my own photos, I remain clueless. Nevertheless, I decided to forge ahead anyway, 'cause that’s what I do.
I’ve only gotten as far as doing some testing of the engrave settings, but I thought I’d share them. The material is PG medium maple hardwood, and the images are all engraved with standard PG settings–the only thing I did was switch between “convert to dots” and “vary power” to test both options for each setting. Asterisks indicate the defaults.
I’m puzzled by a couple of things. One is how much better the draft and SD settings look than the HD settings. Another is why SD Graphic defaults to “vary power,” while HD Graphic defaults to “convert to dots.” And yet another is how the SD graphic convert to dots setting came out so different than the rest.
Anyway, I thought I’d share, in case others are interested.
You are doing exactly the right thing. Experimenting! You might also want to play around in a photo editing program or two. Maybe experiment with different shapes and sizes of dots for dithering.
