I think you should load the original image without knocking out the background and see if it produces more detail.
When you compare the photo you engraved with its histogram, both of them actually show the same two peaks of gray/black, with very little contrast or detail across the rest of the image.
I could be wrong.
Wow! I think you might have nailed the reason. Of course, my actual image in Photoshop has the white removed, but flattened when I made it a png. Maybe I’ll try making it a gif w/ transparency and see how that changes things. VERY interesting find there, I think!
Thanks!
Just so you know, PNG supports transparency too. Just check your export settings.
PNG supports transparency as well, but I’m not sure if the GFUI supports it. There should be an option in Photoshop to export your PNG with transparency.
Yeah it does. It handles GIF, PNG and JPEG for the raster files. 
Does it? Who knew. 
I’m not big on making pngs usually. 
But, you’re right… Not sure if the GFUI supports the transparency on any raster file. Who’s got two thumbs and is going to give it a try? 
THIS GUY.
Yeah, but does it accept transparency or value it to white?
Leaves it transparent. Just ran one.
(matter of fact, it was that one I did for @Xabbess - turned out nicely as a depth engrave, although it could use a little lightening to bring out more detail in the suit…)
One bad spot in the cheap birch ply…left a streak in his nose. But otherwise, got fairly nice definition on the face area.
Excellent. Thanks for the brain-bump!
Interesting… I was just going through my material list… I have TWO 1/4 Maple Plywood listed! One has only 1 darkness setting, the other has 3!
I think that’s a bug? Guess I’ll report it to be on the safe side, huh.
I would.
Yep. Good catch. Bug. 
Be sure to report it to support.
Oh, I did. I figure anything I think is weird is worth reporting. Either it’s worth their time,or it’s not. Either way, I’ve done my civic duty.
Since you have a production machine that you paid for there should be a manual describing what it does. It is crazy having to guess and do experiments at this stage.
I was about to swat that until I noticed It moved with the scroll bar.
It’s one of my favorite GIFs. 
Oh awesome! That simplifies setup!
I was on YouTube last night, think I was watching AvE… one of his commenters had an avatar thats a white background with a single hair on it… that drove me nuts even after I realized it wasnt MY hair.
Well, there’s a manual. It describes many things. I found it described some things very well. Like how to open an existing item you have stored in the GFUI. And how to add additional images to combine them to make something new. And how to scan from the camera. So that was great. In the photo area, I found the documentation to be a little lacking. They do say things like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “your image needs to have sufficient resolution and contrast.” But no real specific tips on that. And, I’m kind of okay with that. Photo quality is subjective. You may think my photo above looks like crap. And I might completely disagree. (Although. in this case, I think I can do better.) If @mpipes is right about the histogram and the range sort of averaging out, it would have been nice to mention that in the documentation. But that has yet to be proven out. I look forward to testing that tonight. (Although it turns out we’ll have no kids tonight, so I dunno if I’ll be allowed to play with Geordi.) So, on one hand, you have a point. On the other hand, I don’t know how much detail they can or should try to squeeze into the manual. I would think it would have been appropriate to have a photo waiting in the GFUI to show what a “proper” photo engrave can look like and then maybe generally point out why that photo works well. They did not do that. And, as a matter of fact, I’m going to suggest they do. They walked you specifically through other things, why not that.
Yeah… I’ve been outside the past couple of hours. I was sure it was real.
Edit: sorry if you read post from before, I’ve had a bad day but no excuse for being rude. If you read it before I changed it sorry @palmercr
I honestly haven’t read every response Tom so this might have already been covered, but I think dithering is the issue with the photo vs the distinct two-tones of the other images. The image being in subtle greyscale makes for a very flat result and it needs to be in B/W. Apologies if this is redundant, but I think this first video gives great examples of greyscale vs dithered B/W and the huge difference it can make when lasering.
The second video gives a nice look at the process of prepping the photo.
