I engraved a picture on acrylic to put into a LED lighted frame. The light goes through the acrylic and comes out the top, but does not light up the picture as I have seen others do. Any suggestions?
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Perhaps sharing a photo of of the lighted frame you are using would help us help you.
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Right now all I have is the LED light cord and held it up against the edge of the picture.
There are lots of posts about this: Start here: Search results for 'edge lit' - Glowforge Owners Forum
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I have worked with edge lit acrylic pieces a lot and would like to see a photo of your engraved piece. Just holding a light strip underneath it without any surrounding box will not give you the full effect anyway, but perhaps if we can see what you’re describing we can offer some help.
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Yeah, what they said - but also - try turning your piece of acrylic around. Depending on how you’re holding it sometimes it catches better one way over the other.
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What I have found helpful:
engrave deeply from the back
try changing which edge you have the light coming from
look out for areas near the light that are hogging/ blocking it
thicker acrylic
a clean, glassy cut on the edge
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I tend to agree with this part of the suggestions in @PhxFrge’s response. There is so much going on in the lower part of your engrave that it’s ‘hogging’ all the light. Unless you can break the engraved image into different areas and do a light engrave on the bottom and a deeper engrave on the top, there might not be a resolution for this.
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Or make a frame with light strips going all the way around it to light from all angles.
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Essentially you need a gradient that gets darker the further away from the light you get. The deeper the engrave the more light it’ll grab as the light passes. So if the entire engrave is at the same depth, all the light that you want to hit the top has already been used by the engrave closer to the lights.
Some have figured out how to use this to introduce additional “depth” but that’s not what you need here.
If you were to look from the side you need the most shallow part engraved at the bottom, and it should get progressively deeper the further up the piece you go.
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That makes sense, thanks.