So! This new print didn’t come out much different than the last. Slightly darker, but I can’t say for sure that that’s not the wood. Again, I used .85" scrap from the same pile, but that doesn’t mean a thing. So… Definitely darker. But not worth taking a pic of the new one.
So now I’m left with a question that I hope to answer tonight… I get why the pic is “flat” and why the heart had amazing depth. (SO cool. I could do it again and again. So I did it again last night larger and it was even cooler to watch and then behold!) But, what I don’t get is… why did my words come out in varying depth when they were exactly the same as the pic. Unfortunately, the words are really too small to tell for sure how deep they are. So maybe they’re really not as deep as the heart. Tonight I’m going to take a single word and make it pretty big and see how deep it engraves.
Alright. I didn’t think to sharpen when I did them. But I thought of it too late last night when I saw that my kids, basically, have no noses. So I will try that advice.
Oh, I get that! Now.
Lame. But it explains why my red heart showed up as pure black in the GFUI. And now I totally understand what @marmak3261 was saying earlier… “A vector fill that has gradients is not processed in grayscale”
I’m also fiddling around within Photoshop to try and simulate what a photo might look like etched into wood. I didn’t play with that too long, but if I come up with a process that I think works well, I’ll be happy to share it.
Looks like we will never know. In the mean time people waste material trying to engrave pictures because there is no technical description of how images are interpreted, so its trial an error and may change at any point.
Which one explains how the GF makes a qualitative distinction between a bitmap photo and a bitmap representation of text and processes them differently. Seems bizarre. What happens if you take a photo of some text?
I think I will wait until I get a GF, especially as it will have changed by then. Seems odd I have to search third party tutorials for something that should be in the manual.
My understanding was that if you wanted to do a 3D engrave as opposed to a 2D grey scale engrave it was a different menu option, not something to do with the nature of the contents of the bitmap.
Not odd at all. This is actually a design related issue, not something that has anything whatsoever to do with the Glowforge.
(They don’t need to be explaining to people how to design their files, although they do touch on it briefly just for those getting started. It’s way outside of their purview.)
Fortunately, there was a group of people here who realized that there would be some people confused about the difference, and the materials are available to those who are willing to learn about them.
Spending the time while you are waiting for your machine to learn as much as you can seems like a pretty good idea to me.
There is a menu option there for 3D Engrave, but I don’t think it’s active. At least every time I’ve tried it’s said something like “3D Engrave is not available for this Proofgrade material.” So, yeah… I guess, now that I think about it, I don’t know why my heart had such a great deep engrave. Seems like unless I chose 3D Engrave it should have resembled the depth of the bitmap as both used Engrave By Color.
You’d think. But, of course, everybody works differently. For me, I can tell you that everything I’ve “learned” by reading this and many other forums, hasn’t yielded as much as one might think since I haven’t been able to apply it practically until now. And that’s how I am. Learn it and do it, and then I’ve got it. Learn it, and do it months later almost does me no good. But that’s me. Not to say I haven’t learned a great deal. It’s just the odd application timing of the knowledge and when and where to apply it, etc.
I am not following at all. Whether a grey scale in a bit map represents a picture to be rendered as lightness and darkness in a 2D engrave or as depth in a 3D engrave seems like something the machine can’t decide for itself.
Or are you saying RGB images render as 2D and palletised images render as 3D?
I will leave reading the tutorials until I have the GF and find I can’t operate it. If I read them now I will have forgotten by the time it arrives as I have no memory for things I don’t understand the reason for. I have to build up a mental model of what the machine does for each input, not a blind procedure I need to follow.
It doesn’t decide. The user has to activate a switch in the software to turn on the depth, but 3D Engraving is NOT available right now so it’s only doing 2D engrave. Although it seems some folks are getting some fairly deep engraves.
Well that certainly confuses things. At least for me. You can’t convince me the heart above is 2D. I haven’t measured its depth, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its 1/16" deep. It is simply stunning. At least to me. But I don’t get why that black vector object engraves any differently that a black bitmap object. It seems to me that it does decide something. If it didn’t, all things would be equal.
Have you tried running all 3 items on the same job instead of independently? Black is black except when there’s two/three different jobs where black can be interpreted differently for each.
Maybe the photo itself just is not a good candidate for engraving. When you try to boost contrast it goes south in a hurry.
No. I considered doing that, but decided not to muddy the water by doing that.
I don’t get it.
Maybe not. Although the photo contains pure black, so…
However, thinking along those lines, I created a simple black box in Photoshop. This was a sold, black vector box, saved as a png. It resulted in the same level of “depth” as the photo. Which is to say, not really at all. Then I re-engraved the heart svg above. Clean, awesome, DEEP engrave.
Most of the “third party” tutorials deal with “third party” design programs (with thoughts of using them with the GF). You can follow the tutorials just fine with no machine, and make designs for later. You could even post a design and ask nicely and someone who already has a machine might test cut/engrave something for you.
I only design with OpenSCAD and I don’t need a tutorial for that as I know it inside out, I even work on the source code. So I don’t need any tutorials for design.
I will write my own tools to turn STLs into grey scale if the GF looks like it will do accurate 3D engraves. If not I will stick to 2D and use my 3D printers for 3D.
If the GF comes with a proper manual I don’t anticipate needing to read tutorials.
I probably won’t make anything with it will impress these forums as I have no artistic ability at all. I look at the things people make here and realise I will never be able to create things like that. Not through lack of knowledge how to use tools, but complete lack of any artistic imagination.
Well-designed stuff (maybe 3D-printer accessories in your case, I dunno) will impress the forum as much as “art”… more so in many cases, as art is so very subjective while proper engineering (ie: this part serves this function and performs at or above spec) is not (well, not as much anyway, IMHO).
As far as a proper manual, well, I have no idea what will come with the GF.
(digression) I did have a laugh the other day while reading through the owner’s manual that came with my pickup truck, and imagining someone trying to learn to drive a stick shift with just what was written there. Two (small) pages of instructions for manual shifting… 77 pages how and why to use the seatbelts. Want repair instructions? Gotta buy a third-party “tutorial” book for ~$40, or drop ~$300 on the Factory Service Manual (which does NOT come with the truck). (/digression)
I took the original image file @Tom_A uploaded, took it into Photoshop, and got to work on it.
I did a quick background removal, adjusted the Contrast, made a couple of adjustments to the levels, adjusted the Sharpening using the High-Pass filter and ran the improved (for laser) print on two different settings as an embedded file in an SVG file.
The one on the left was run at the standard Medium engrave settings in the GFUI.
I thought it was still a little washed out, so I went in and did a manual over-ride on the settings, to increase the power and the LPI from the Medium settings. (I did not want to go as high as the dark settings with it, although that is an option. It will take a LOT longer to engrave it.) The slight bumps in settings yielded the one on the right without increasing the time significantly, and gave a much sharper looking result on the facial features.
This didn’t take long…the longest part was removing the flipping background, but without the tweaks, the photo isn’t really adapted well for laser, so the results tend to look washed out when they are engraved.
The photo can probably be further tweaked, but that wasn’t a bad result for a half hour’s work.
I’ll attach the tweaked png file so you can see how it differs from the original.
WOW! Thanks for that! That’s WAY better than mine. You gave my kids their noses back! And you got a clearly-defined teddy bear! But I hadn’t played with sharpness at all yet. That’s tonight’s fun. The contrast that I’m seeing is way higher than I had. I’d played around with it that high, but I’m not yet able to judge what I see on the screen vs laser. It’s a whole new world for me there.
Quick questions…
What was the purpose of embedding it?
What wood did you use?
What LPI did you use?
Can you attach the file without it being converted to an image on the site? (i.e. zip it or something so it’s unaltered by the site?)
That’s just the way I do it…easier for me to align the image inside the vector file (the rectangle around it that i use for cutting), embed it, and then load the one file up to the interface.
You can also drag and drop the raster image file onto an open vector file in the interface. (Not as accurate.)
Cheap, cheap, cheap scrap end cuts from some birch plywood. It’s gonna look a whole lot better on Proofgrade.
270 LPI for the second one.
That file is an image file…it’s a raster. Did you want the SVG file?
Oh, I see what you mean…it got turned into a jpg with a background…hang on…
Not to say I haven’t learned a great deal. It’s just the odd application timing of the knowledge and when and where to apply it, etc.
