Ran a gradient from top to bottom and exported as a raster. I’ll post results in an hour. Trying to catch up on the Chiefs tonight having recorded the first half cause I had services.
I’ll go ahead and do a full percentage engrave too. Ok. Looking Again I see I forgot to kick power to 100%. Restart
Great! Thank you! I’m biting my nails with the chiefs game.
I need to learn about gradient. I’m familiar a gradient in photo shop, but I’m still learning my way around inkspace and trying to figure out what the best program is for this kind of designing.
Ok. Restart. I haven’t done enough work lately. I’m rusty. Forgot to remove masking from face for this engrave. Variable power like this, needs no masking. Othewise I use it and burn through for easy cleanup. something like this isn’t hard to weed.
I don’t think you even need to mess with a gradient but it does work well.
It worked ok, except I didn’t quite drag the gradient line all the way down through the end of the note, so it didn’t engrave. I should have done 5% as minumum and that would have done it.
I didn’t defocus the engrave. So a little more banding than I like. Also didn’t dust it off.
I can see why you wanted to test it out a bit. It’s a big piece.
I lowered the gradient line all the way past the note in this SVG. You will need to export the filled area as a bitmap and then bring it back in for the operation since it is still an SVG gradient.
1398/Full 270 lpi. I did 0% minimum, but you would at least want 5%.
Thank you so much!!!
Gradient engraving is definitely the way to go. I do these signs that have a lot of engraving to them, but they’re fully illuminated with the gradual nature of the engrave.
Can we take this Beyond the Manual so we can do the settings without any crabbing?
That looks nice. Defocused?
Beautiful!
Yes-I switched it over. 
If you were asking about nice, then yes, defocused! I just can’t do acrylic projects without it now 
I’m finally back to my glowforge today (darn real job gets in the way!) I’m familiar with gradients in photoshop, but I’ve been using silhouette software and Inkscape as I’ve been learning how to forge. What software would be best for me to buy/learn—are you using illustrator?
Inkscape supports gradient fill.
Thanks, I didn’t realize that. I’ve got a lot more to learn.
I’m all Inkscape. It even has mesh gradients. Took me a while to figure out the control points in gradients but it really worked great on the engrave of the blue note. It barely colored the bottom of the note to going about 1mm deep at the top of the engrave.
I am struggling a little bit with Inkscape. I did portrait photography for about 10 years and got really good with Photoshop, so switching over is a little different. But I’ll get it! 
So, I found the gradient tool and can see how to extend it down past the note. I don’t know how to export as a bitmap, though. I know–this should be something basic, but I don’t have that figured out yet.
One of the challenging things is just getting familiar with the icons and menus. The icons are small. There is a setting you can adjust to get them bigger. I am still learning. Then you get into all the filters, extensions and path effects.
Three steps under File > Export then choose page drawing or selection
Thank you!
Inkscape has very good tutorials.
https://inkscape.org/learn/tutorials/
Spending time reading through them will definitely pay off.
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