Settings in Glowforge
Speed = 700
Power = 80
Grayscale = Wary Power
The pictures takes round 45 minutes each to engrave
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Moved to beyond the manual since it has non-pg settings.
It’s awesome that you shared your settings, but Glowforge requires them to be in beyond the manual.
Thanks for sharing what you’ve learned!
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Great work, and ditto to what @evansd2 said - thanks for sharing your settings!
Where did you get your MDF?
That first image is particularly posh looking 
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Its scrap bits i found in our Attic storage.
They are probably bought at a local DIY store called Ă…ngsĂĄgen
Yes. I live in Sweden
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those came out great. i’m curious about your image processing before engraving. it looks like you either started with something already set up to engrave or you did a really good job processing the images to engrave.
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You did a fantastic job on these! Thanks for sharing your settings.
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I use AI generated pictures. I mostly work with pictures with two colors, black and white, generated in a technique who emulates gray scale like, wood cut, wood engraving, or stippling.
I load the picture in a bitmap editor called Krita and remove the white color and export the picture as PNG.
Pictures with a limited grayscale also works well but depends much of the motive. Photographic pictures has no turned out well at all.
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yeah, photos take a lot more processing, and that’s why i asked about your technique and how you processed. if you use a regular photo, it needs to be very crisp and have a lot of contrasty detail. and then you need to process it to be even more contrast. the more middle gray there is, the muddier the image will engrave. i’ve had some success, but you have to be really picky about the source image and then you have to work it to get it to where it will engrave well.
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Love that tongue!!
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Glowforge engraves pure white and transparent the same by doing nothing at all. Only from the lowest level of gray to black will even have the laser head go over it.
Awesome work BTW.
Edit:
I just looked up Krita and am impressed enough to download it. Like Gimp it is Open Source and free and talks about doing video as well as pixel editing. I am curious how well it does with vectors. Gimp has a great ability to create vectors but falls down a bit on editing them.
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Compared to Gimp, Krita is far more complex and subtle. This can be good or bad depending on one’s intentions. I also use Irfanview which does not even have masks but on older machines, I could bring up an image fix it, and be gone before Gimp even came up.
Krita and Gimp could be like that where cleaning up an image for engraving could be faster and easier in Gimp, whereas Krita would need far more work and knowledge to do the same thing.
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I think it the result looks better if i remove the white background color.
The removal also reduce engraving time.
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If that’s the case then the background isn’t white, it’s some sort of very light grey as @rbtdanforth mentioned.
Erasing the “white” background is often the best way to be sure, sounds like you’re doing the right thing.
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A standard thing I do is hit the contrast of the “white” area. Particularly with JPGs, there is usually a lot of garbage that needs attention. The jaggies usually cause issues with pixel graphics that I smooth with Gimp’s ability to run a tool along a vector.
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I love Krita as an open source art program. I was using it before i moved to clip studio. I absolutely could never wrap my head around gimp. I tried a few times, but i just couldn’t see myself using it again.
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I was using Gimp for a few years as a side for Blender so it was not hard to blend it in to Inkscape. But Krita looks a lot more complicated but more focused in from scratch painting than modifying images already existing that is Gimp’s stregnth.
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Yeah, i was using krita as an actual draw and paint program. I never thought to try and edit a photo in it.
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