After seeing the success stories here with engraving on granite, I’m trying to do the same. We have some good friends who recently lost their beloved dog, and built a grave for her at their cabin. I want to give them a granite tile with the dog’s photo engraved on it, along with her name. So I bought some granite tile to experiment upon, and went to work using the settings I’ve seen on other posts (335 speed, 30% power, 270 LPI). Didn’t use masking of any type.
What you see here is the result. I’m also posting the image file I’m using, which was processed in Photoshop and halftoned, since I’ve never been able to get decent results with just grayscale. I’ve made this image look good on slate, but that’s not a good option for an outdoor gravesite that’s hot in the summer and frozen in winter. Gotta use granite.
I realize that granite is a much more “speckled” type of rock than slate, so there’s going to be some loss of photo detail on my final product. I can live with that. But I’m bothered by the banding I see on her neck, and also below her eyes. And if you take a close look at her face, it seems to me there’s a subtle banding across the whole thing, almost like what you get from an inkjet printer with nozzles that aren’t quite aligned. I was doing some engraving on wood the other day, and it came out fine, so I don’t think it’s an alignment problem with the GF itself. But while I’m no expert on granite or rocks in general, I have to question whether the banding would be so straight if it was an issue with the layers in the rock. Could this be a problem with my LPI setting? Maybe I have to adjust it a bit one way or the other?
Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.