How does color impact settings?

Beyond the Manual
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Hey all, how does color impact settings? I’m fine tuning a number of new acrylics and am having inconsistent results from color to color. Any tips on adjustment as i go lighter vs darker or red vs blue etc. would be wonderful.

Thanks!

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Officially, it doesn’t. If you can demonstrably prove otherwise, you need to open a thread in Problems and Support.

(Some of us have discovered that it might, but not been able to convince GF that is the case…)

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Are you asking how do darker colors do with heat retention on the acrylics? They do a little, but not so much that it should impact being able to cut through. Black tends to have a fractionally larger kerf, and is a little bit messier. White reflects and does the opposite. You might have to slow the speed down by a point or two on white or very light colors to get through in one pass.

Putting a white masking on it pretty much eliminates the variances on the thinner acrylics. For Thick acrylics, you might have to tweak speeds down just a hair. It’s a real pain to not make it all the way through on acrylics, because you can’t get them to break free reliably, and second passes really mess the kerf up. (You can try a much faster speed on the second pass and that will cut through without remelting as much.)

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Thanks! then any idea why they have different colors in their settings for proofgrade materials? sounds like pointless extra coding to me, if no impact wouldnt it just be “medium acrylic” or “thick acrylic”?

Thanks again!

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Thanks! I agree completely! I’ve got about 30 colors i’m testing on and find the settings will work perfectly for one but not for another. In addition I notice with too much power there will be impact other than kerf. I’m not sure what to call it. its almost like a border effect where you can see evidence of the cut for a millimeter or more into the acrylic piece. While it feels flat you can see its been distorted like a bubble under a plastic mask.

Thanks again!

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For an engrave fill, color should have no effect besides the order of where the thumbnail is displayed on the left-hand-side of the GFUI. For a raster image, then yes.

Be careful you’re not chasing noise in your material. The same setting can have a slightly different result and it is all the material - not the laser. Good luck.

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Sounds like he means color of materials, not color of vectors. :slight_smile:

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Yes, this thank you

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In that case, the materials are different so differences in settings should be expected. Different manufacturers may use different dye formulas, so red from company A may be different from company B. I ran into your issue using cardstock from the same manufacturer. Six of eight cardstocks (five of seven??) used the same settings. The power setting on the remaining two colors was different.

Depending on how fine you are trying to get your settings, expect variation from lot to lot of the same color. The thickness of most materials varies slightly. Sometimes it varies across a single piece, but more likely between lots.

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If you look up specs for acrylic sheet from actual manufacturers of materials, you’ll find there can be fairly significant variation even across an individual sheet.

Proofgrade material settings have been developed to allow reliable cutting across the entire range, but that means they are not perfect for each individual sheet.

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