iPhone5 trials not what I was hoping for

sweet_wood · January 21, 2018, 9:25pm

I’m at a loss. I dont understand why I cannot get a clear print on aluminum. First I was hoping to copy what this person did. An image of the inside of the iPhone.

My first few starts were a fail because I forgot to invert the image. Hence it was making the black white.

Then I printed the bottom half of the image. You can still see this striping in the image that I dont know what is causing it but it is so consistant. I stopped halfway because I realized I needed some better image processing. I needed to bump up the contrast big time.

Then after processing some more I ran the top half. Now I am getting this banding across the image as you can see. If it wasnt for the light spots it would look great. And of course the fact its not aligned. HELP please. This is so frustrating.

kennethclapp · January 21, 2018, 9:40pm

any chance you could upload your artwork so we can see what’s going on there as well? that banding on the top half in particular is confusing. Also, what setting, particularly power and LPI were you using?

sweet_wood · January 21, 2018, 9:50pm

Here is the file used for the top. I used settings of 1000/30%/450 and used “Vary Power” one pass.
iphone-5c3.pdf (5.1 MB)

sweet_wood · January 23, 2018, 10:27pm

Anyone else have any ideas why I am getting this issue?

dan · January 26, 2018, 5:35am

Moving to Beyond the Manual, which is the right place for experiments on non-Proofgrade materials.

Note that anodized aluminum is, by far, one of the most unforgiving surfaces, and extremely sensitive to settings, focus, power, and many other factors. Unfortunately I don’t know what’s causing that particular problem.

imahappylewis · March 13, 2018, 4:51am

I’ve had similar banding issue although i am only getting one band near the bottom
I am also getting artifacts outside the image. I assure you that just outside the bird is blank white (I double checked) the laser seems to ocationaly shoot off one more burst of energy after the image ends. Anyone having this problem?
this was etched at 1000/40 2 passes.

imahappylewis · March 13, 2018, 4:52am

here is a close up of the face to see the artifact issue

Jules · March 13, 2018, 5:03am

I responded to this on your other post…you can do some work in something like Photoshop to clean that up.

mpipes · March 13, 2018, 6:17am

I’m going to guess that’s a JPG format image, in which case you can “white out” the background until you’re blue in the face, the JPG compression can still cause artifacts in engraving.

Save the original source image as a PNG format file, they are lossless and don’t present the same problems as JPG’s.