Hello lovely people. I hope someone can give me some insight on the attached photo. If you look close the engraved leather has different darkness mostly noticeable on the leaves where my arrows are pointing. My machine has been cleaned thoroughly. My settings are identical for each bookmark engraved. And they are on same sheet of veg tan leather. But for some reason some of the leaves are very, very light compared to others. Can anyone explain the reason for this variation in darkness?
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Looks to me that you’re using a greyscale image for different “depths” of engrave. Leather (and non-proofgrade wood) are inconsistent materials, so you find settings (in this case, a shade in your image) that only just work on one section, they may not produce the desired results in others.
I can give an example, a lot of people get very inconsistent engraves across laminated strips of bamboo. The solution is generally to increase the settings to produce an overall darker engrave, which will “break thru” the tougher surface to produce a more satisfactory result.
In your case, I’d suggest darkening the shade of those leaves.
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I will second Efly’s comment. some materials are more uniform than others. I have seen what you are experiencing on leather and bamboo cutting boards.
up the power so it is darker across the piece, only thing you can do really.
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Thank you. I unfortunately only have this less than optimal color jpg file to work with. And I don’t have any way of converting to vector image (if that is what is needed) The customer wants the leaves to be lighter than the actual flower. Only sometimes they barely show up at all.
Thank you for your input 
What is your experience with graphic editing tools? Anyone familiar with raster (bitmap) editing should be able to “fix” that in a couple of minutes. Lose the color, adjust the curves, possibly re-fill the leaves with a slightly darker shade.
I only have Inkscape, I may be wrong, but I don’t think I can vectorize with that program.
You can, but that is not what needs to be done. That would be one way to tackle it, but vector isn’t required. A bitmap editing program like gimp would be more suitable.
The learning curve for both of these programs is pretty steep, however. If you’re going to do custom work, it’s kind of assumed you have experience using the appropriate tools. It’s fine that you don’t, we will have to start somewhere, but be prepared for a long learning experience.
As stated, it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes for someone with that experience to make the necessary adjustments. Or, you could simply tell the person that gave you that file but it’s not suitable for the laser as it is.