I have been busting my behind trying to figure out if it’s the actual photo or my settings that needs to be adjusted to get this photo engraved on the clear acrylic. I’ve engraved this photo several times with the plastic backing it comes with, without the masking, with dish soap, I’ve inverted the photo twice, added more contrast to the inverted photo, and I still get the same result. What am I doing wrong? Please help! This is a paying customer and idk if it’s the photo she gave me that needs to be adjusted, or if it’s my settings. Please help! This is a paying customer.
I have a feeling that part of the reason might be because you’re using extruded acrylic. Some people may have OK luck engraving extruded, but generally the results are poor compared to using cast. Most times (not all) the plastic masking is a giveaway that it’s extruded.
yes, low resolution and poor quality (it’s very flat, not much contrast or detail).
sometimes it’s possible to work on an image and make it more engravable, but in the end, photo engraving is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
yes, this too. if your acrylic has plastic masking, it’s likely extruded acrylic, which doesn’t engrave well. you want to do engraving on cast acrylic, which usually has paper masking.
when you do cut extruded and have plastic masking, you always want to remove the plastic masking first.
So if I run tests on the acrylic, should I just use the clear casting acrylic I have? Because I’ve removed the plastic backing, added the dish soap and still, it does not engrave properly.
Yes, I understand that. I might have worded myself incorrectly. I have both, the extruded and cast acrylic. I’ve been using the extruded acrylic as test dummies. I removed the plastic backing and added dish soap on the plastic and still got a very poor quality engraving. So my question is, should I just run some tests on the cast acrylic? Because I didn’t want to waste material by running a bunch of tests on my good quality acrylics.
Certainly your choice, but you will likely see better results using some of your cast. You don’t have to use the entire photograph…crop out part of the photo and try it on a small piece. You really can’t compare test results well if you’re using two different materials.
I threw in a gradient along the top to bring some of that back. But all in all, not a ton of detail to work with.
@jarenicebravo : I uploaded a zip file with an edited photo in the zip. But again, resolution is going to be an issue since your cropping it down to about 1/3rd of even the low resolution image that you uploaded here.
Testing on the final product material (cast acrylic in your case) is always the best approach. There are two challenges to testing on extruded acrylic - extruded is just not going to give the same result as cast and even if you get your design dialed in, those settings may not work on cast.
Woods have the same challenge – If I optimize an engrave on apiece of basswood (Janka hardness of 410 lbs/ft), those settings won’t necessarily work (yield the exact same results) on different species, say hard maple (1450) or purpleheart (2520).
I wonder if with this particular image, it would look better inverted? That is, do an invert in your photo processing software that converts black to white and vice versa.
Echoing what everyone else is saying about image quality - the original is just lacking in detail. You may have to decide it has to be stylized to get better results, simple contrast adjustments aren’t going to do much. For example: these were ran through an “artistic” phone app filter to be more like line drawings, could stand some cleanup in photoshop.
So should I try one of these? Or ask her for a much better quality photo? It shouldn’t take this long but then again, I’m still learning and didn’t know that poor quality photos would also affect the quality of the engraving. I ran a test engrave in my cast acrylic and it was better but still not good.
You might want to try using a high DPI 675 is not too high but you will need to increase the speed to compensate. Also using dots at high LPI could improve things. Using variable power makes darker things cut deeper which is great if the image was created with white to black was created to match the real 3D but can look odd if done on a normal image.
