ENGRAVING ISSUE > In another thread, I was having trouble with alignment and I was sent a new carriage plate setup. Recalibrated, aligned…all of that…did a deep clean and cleaning lenses often.
My issue now is that engraving is screwy. It will double engrave, or skip places, not consistent at all. Tried different LPI and same result. I have about 1000 ornaments to do and am very frustrated! Any help is appreciated!
Pic attached > Set at 195LPI and it is perfect in some places, and lines are visible in other areas
195 LPI is wide enough to miss or double up on pixel rows if you are engraving mages. I am perhaps more extreme than others but rarely go below 450 lpi and even that I consider rough. Looking at that photo most of the problem looks like an image issue as you also have random dots as you would get from using a jpg image from what was a perfect image before going to jpg and even more if it was a jpg that was modified and saved again as a jpg.
If it was an image I would go to Gimp to clean it up and then save the masks as vectors and even then clean it finally in Inkscape as there are many straight lines that do not need any extra pixels and thus be easy to clean up.
Quite the opposite. If it is already vectors then it need cleaning up in your vector program. If you are engraving an underlying image AND the vector then that would be the double engraving.
Engraving from vector is as tight as it can be as there is no “place between pixel rows” or any gray areas that could get a variable response. The very act of saving as a jpg will lose information with much that is white have light gray places and parts that are black have dark gray places. The first thing I do when vectorizing a jpg is to make it extreme contrast so the grays go to their proper places.
Do you have the same problem with the Gift of Good Measure? Also, can you post a screenshot of your settings?
I almost wonder if it’s the opposite issue: I’ve never trusted Glowforge to engrave vectors directly, I always rasterize them myself (and put up a video about this to make it easier to explain). That artifact looks so weird, it feels like it could be coming from bad vector-to-raster conversion on the GF side. Or like rbtdanforth said, you may have shades of grey in there, and it could be trying to dither them.
