Draft and HD photos

Community Support
1

is anyone else having issues getting good looking engravings on PG materials with the Draft photo and HD photo settings?
I have used HD and it barely went through the masking, I have tried them with different photos and they all come out looking bad. I am at the point now where I do not even want to try anymore because I dont want to waste more of this PG material for more failed testing.

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2

Remember when testing with PG (or any other) material and you don’t like the results, flip the board (stone, coaster, etc) over and you’ve got a fresh surface for your next test.

3

Also, crop small portions to test with. No reason to waste whole sheets until you know what will happen.

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4

I definitely try to do this for areas of importance that I’m unsure of on images. Very quick and easy in Illustrator: just make a few 1x1” boxes (or whatever size) and a few copies of your final image size in Illustrator, then crop each down to the area you want to see rendered.

6

Yes I have been using both sides and smaller images. My main issue is that everything I try still looks bad compared to the photo option that was available before that is now expiring.

has anyone had success with Draft or HD photo? and if so what did you do.
I have tried using a normal image, making it black and white, editing it various levels of brightness and contrast and even on wood that has the masking on and off and in each case it never looks as good.

7

I used SD settings with good success (unmasked PG) for some Christmas gifts. A lot of it really just depends on the photo, the processing can make a big difference; I had to do a couple of iterations before I was happy.

If you want to share the original photo and what you’ve tried, I’m sure someone here can help.

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8

I’m sorry you saw less than beautiful results with these settings and that we took so long to reply! I’m afraid we need a bit more information to investigate further:

  1. Do you know the date and time (including time zone) of any of the prints that didn’t come out well?
  2. If you’re willing, please post or email support@glowforge.com photos of the results with a description of what didn’t work well.
9

It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.