You can also give a little more width to that line by defocusing. I did that for a job that used score instead of engrave to speed everything up and once I found a good setting, it worked well.
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I get that it treats the white as transparent and doesn’t actually mark the surface of the material, but when I process two versions of the same image (white background vs transparent background) there is a significant difference in engraving time. I just did a quick test to confirm and the solid white image took 11 minutes to do, the transparent version only 6 minutes. Am I the only one experiencing this?
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No – I’ve had the same experience. I now create a completely transparent background – and those where I didn’t, Ijust tell it to ignore the background “engrave”
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If you have a 10" x 10" white-filled box with a 1" x 1" box to engrave in the middle, I believe if you turn the white to transparent, you end up with just a 1" x 1" box to engrave (and no 10" x 10" transparency).
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Guess it depends on what you’re trying to do…
If it’s a filled vector you are uploading, it will see it as an object to engrave.
If it’s pure white in a raster image, it’s not picked up in the engrave.
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Remove the white fill color inside the rectangle. (Just set it to none.) The Glowforge interface treats any vector Fill color as something to be engraved, even white fill color.
If you don’t want to cut the rectangle after removing the fill, convert it to a Score in the GFUI.
Here’s a little writeup that helps with setting up vector files for the Glowforge interface:
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We were talking about bitmap engraves. The behavior seems to be to treat white as transparent but not for the purpose of determining the bounding box.
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Maybe a good rule of thumb is, “don’t put pixels on the screen where you wouldn’t want the GlowForge doing stuff.”
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If that was a raster, it wouldn’t be solid fill like that. Somewhere in there is a filled vector rectangle.
(I believe.) 
@emrod48, If you want to post up the AI file, it might be easier to find what the issue is.
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Incorrect.
Unhelpful.
Here is a 5x5" white square with a 1x1" black square inside that is rasterized. As you can see on the layers palette on the left hand side, it is only one layer and one bitmap image.
This is the same 5x5" white square with the same 1x1" black square inside.
The only thing the Glowforge cares about in a raster engrave is anything that is not 255, 255, 255 pure white.
As for the bounding box, I can make that any shape that I want and the Glowforge is going to ignore the white on the outside and take the shortest path across the X-axis that is possible.
Here is a 5x5" white square with a 1x1" square and then a triangle on top of the square. It’s a single raster image. Maybe it’s a bad builder trying to make a house.
And again - the Glowforge doesn’t care about the white background.
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Yep. I was with @chris1 on this one, but I just did the same test and was about to post the same result.
Interesting, then, than people are seeing different times using transparent vs white.
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Thank you for clearing it up. I didn’t do that test since I wasn’t near a computer. I just repeated what I thought others were saying. Shows the value of seeing for yourself.
Maybe the people who saw a difference didn’t use pure white.
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I didn’t need to do so to prove it to myself. I mentioned this not long ago - as I was pleasantly surprised that the software was intelligent enough to ignore it/255,255,255 and create a shorter motion plan.
If you aren’t using a swatch or setting it to 255, 255, 255 it can be a little more difficult to get white. You only have to miss pure white by a hair and then you end up with a tint, shade or tone (yup, all different things).
It is possible that the white background file is a jpg. That would have grey pixels around the edges which would enlarge the engrave.
Saving as transparent requires a PNG, which would eliminate that.
No clue if that’s what’s happening here, just a hypothesis.
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That’s certainly possible. JPEG doesnt really do solid areas, so a few stray off-white pixels would be likely in that case.
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That’s what I understood as well and I was confused by Chris comment that the white was ignored. I get that white areas will not be marked by the laser, but they are processed and add to the time the entire takes. (Hope that makes sense, it’s been a very long day lol.)
OK, good to know I’m not the only one who does this. This is like one of those moments when you think your going to a cool costume party and when you show up it’s more like this… lol
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Doing work on some large engraves for a project for my wife, and what appeared to be a white background certainly caused extra engrave time as well as some very slight burn-in on the PG white acrylic. What I have ended up doing is digging up Microsoft Photo Editor from one of the earlier versions of Microsoft Office (I think from 2003 or earlier). file is PhotoEd.exe (and a few ancillary files). There is a great function in the program “Set Transparent Color” which makes it VERY EASY to auto-magically set every color in a picture to transparent - and lets you easily vary the color tolerance from 1 - 3 - 5 and 10%, I believe. This is helping to produce an outstanding engrave of a magnolia for a plate charger (well, a set of 8 actually) for my wife… and shrinking the engrave time from roughly 2+ hours to 45 minutes actually makes it a doable project. (especially when you have to multiply the engrave time by 8 - for the eight chargers in the set.)
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