Keeping detail in a dark engraving

In focus is in focus; Out of focus is out of focus, regardless of material height.

I assume you are propping the material up to get it into focal range. Are you using set focus?

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You would want to be supported to at least the point that the bottom of the engrave is above the 1.5" off the bottom under the crumb tray. you might want to try this ;

No matter what, you do not want to cut or engrave anything more than 1/2" off the deck of the crumb tray or 2" above the bottom under the crumb tray.

Beyond that, not all woods are equal and some will not cut or engrave much more than 1/4" thick material.

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Poplar will be very difficult to cut with detail without burning it up.
Maple, Walnut, and Paduk have held up well but I have not found others that did nearly as good.

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FYI - the image won’t look different between vector and raster - but the options you’ll get in the GFUI will change

For example - you only get 3D (vary power) settings in a raster

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One way to do this is to think of the design as a negative. Make the light dark and the dark light. Because you are beginning with the ground being the highest part and everything else getting deeper and darker, you then miss the highlighted part. You need to carve away and leave the foreground stuff higher and therefore lighter.

This post explains it way better than I can.

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This was the engrave at the top of my list and I needed to test out a new setup, so I resized it to 3.5 inches, 700 speed, 30 power, 170 LPI. Not bad!

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Niiiiice!

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That looks great! I tried it at 300/30 and 270lpi and it came out really nice but a lot deeper than yours. I didn’t mind the darker since I’ll be staining it cherry but I’m going to test your settings tomorrow and see which looks better with the stain! Thanks again!

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Very nice! I think people tend to think the higher the LPI the better, but for a lot of things I get really nice results at 175 or lower.

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There are so many ways to get there!

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As that only makes sense in a raster, as there needs to be a gradient from dark to light. If the raster is solid black there will be only one depth except at the fuzzy edges. The vector will also have the one depth, but with sharp clean edges.

Sometimes you need curved for relief carving, but photos where one side of a face (as example) has more light, the light side of the face will actually be higher than the darker side and look weird, where a raster engrave will just be lighter and darker as in the photo,

Each thing has its place depending on what you want to do,

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