As per your request, I ran the two images again and changed the order. I burned my saved settings first and the HD Graphic preset (with altered settings to match my saved settings) second. Here are the results…
My saved settings (as listed in prior posts)
Printed on 07/07/21 @ 8:17am eastern time
I have tried re-saving the settings from the second attempt as a new custom setting, but it will still engrave looking like the first photo. To get the pictures to turn out how I expect them to, I need to choose the HD Graphic preset and change the settings from there, every time. I don’t understand what has happened.
Any possibility of it being a focus issue? Or an ambient temperature difference? I noticed on a long engrave the quality changed noticeably as the tube temp changed from at start to at end.
How interesting… one of the black box things I’ve always been curious about is what GF does on the processing side for rasters as far as image optimization, etc. Perhaps going with the HD setting is setting a flag and it’s modifying the image when sent to the servers (and that flag is still tripped when overriding the settings), vs no flag for using your own custom settings.
If it is a focus issue, I would think the saved custom preset has the focus issue since everything else going through the GF is working as expected. Then the issue would be why the autofocus isn’t working in my saved setting.
I have used the settings before on an 11x14 print (took 6 hours to complete) and didn’t have any temperature issues then, the engrave was great from start to finish.
I have also run the print starting with the manual mode, inputting my settings as they should be and the print comes out great. Tried saving the manual settings to a new saved item and the print came out horrible again.
Unless someone can look at what my machine is doing, with the time info I gave for my trials, I guess I will just have to manually enter my settings every time I need to engrave a photo…not ideal, but workable.
It might be worth, for experimentation purposes, using your saved settings, but modifying the min/max density values. It could be that for some reason they are being ignored and using the default 0/100 values. Looking at your engravings, it seems that could be the issue: your highlights are basically going very high (min density), and your darks are going very dark (max density).
That definitely seems to be something on the processing end since it comes out exactly the same no matter the order and repeatedly. Staff don’t monitor the BtM category, but I’m tagging @vee & @jae cuz I bet both of them may find this very interesting! Fingers crossed they have thoughts.
I’ve had my glowforge for over a year and I didn’t realize that “Convert to Dots” had a min/max setting until I just read your post.
I was using a really old laptop in the garage when I was first playing with the glowforge and was never able to adjust the pattern density in the first place. The slider wasn’t even visible and nothing happened when you clicked on it. I always thought it was just a graphic showing the range 0-255. Wasn’t until I started using the computer in the office that I realized I could change that.
And at that time, I just thought it was a slider from 0-100 that you could just…I just never noticed the slider on the far right side.
