Preparing high quality images to engrave

[jeremy ledlondon]

Hi All!

This is my first post on SawMill, such a great place to learn about getting the full potential of a laser. Recently purchased a 30w Trotec Rayjet with a friend for commerical use. We have used it a fair bit to re-create logos and cut pieces but have not engraved any decent looking images with high levels of detail.

Can any one help with a step by step guide for preparing an image on corel draw x4 and maybe some power/speed settings for different materials (mainly wood, acrylic and glass)

Any help, much appreciated!!

Jeremy
LED-London

[Ross Moshinsky]

1. You want to work with vector artwork. It is true you can engrave bitmap images, but they rarely look decent. If you don't know the difference between the two, I suggest reading up on it. It's of the highest importance.

2. Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, and Inkscape all offer vector tracing. Many times these programs will work well. Sometimes, a logo takes a lot more work to recreate. For that, there are several services online that can do the job cheaper than you'd ever be able to do it.

3. Do a recent search of the last week for how to configure speed/power/dpi settings. Frankly, you should fine tune your settings yourself. 50 speed, 100pwr, 500/600dpi is a good place to start for plastics, acrylics, and coated metals. For wood you will want to probably slow down a bit.

4. Engraving glass on a laser is really a pain. I'm not sure I've seen a piece of glass laser engraved that screamed high quality. Do a search on here for techniques for engraving glass but my opinion is not to focus on glass engraving too much.

[Larry Bratton]

Jeremy:
Welcome to Sawmill Creek!
The topic of image preparation has been widely discussed on this board. Do a search and you will find tons of information. Every image is different, so to say there is a standard step by step method might be stretching it a bit.

[jeremy ledlondon]

Will try both of your suggestions. Thanks!

[Dan Hintz]

1. You want to work with vector artwork. It is true you can engrave bitmap images, but they rarely look decent.

I'd like to clarify Ross' comment about vector vs. bitmap... for the most part, he is talking strictly about logos that were designed as a vector in the first place (or at least lend themselves to vector redraws). Quality bitmaps are routinely engraved by most everyone here, but when it comes to logos (often simple, single-color images) you want the image as crisp as possible. This generally means a vector image. You cannot (easily) do shading with vectors, so bitmaps have their place for logos more readily rastered.

[jeremy ledlondon]

Thanks very much for your input Dan. I was generally talking about engraving things like photographs, steps to take in order to edit correctly in corel photo paint or adobe photo shop?

[dave hensley]

Hey Jeremy! I am new to lasers and coreldraw and I've found this site (http://www.engrave.ca/) very helpful.

Dave

[Dan Hintz]

Jeremy,

Search here for the Gold Method (for a start) and you'll find plenty of threads to keep you busy...

[Tom Bull]

Check out thead "PhotoGrav class" from a couple of days ago.

[jeremy ledlondon]

Thanks for all your help, have plenty to do now....but dont worry i'll be back for more!