Thought maybe this might be of benefit to someone in a similar circumstance. I had a client that wanted a plaque for a golf tournament, 2-day turnaround, no problem right? He wanted a photo on ceramic tile. I haven't done much with photos yet but I've done a few signs with Cermark and I read the forums often so I'm pretty sure with some trial and error I can do it. Fortunately I have a Photoshop Guru, I show him the "Gold method", (thanks Rodney) and we have a working photo in about 30 minutes with some testing on painted acrylic. I run to Home Depot for some 12"x12" solid white tile and there's none to be had, Lowes, nothing, 3 tile stores later, apparently no one stocks it but can have it here by Friday, no good, now what am I going to do? The painted acrylic looked good but this has to be a fairly tough sign so I thought why not just do it in reverse on the backside of some non-glare acrylic, so I sprayed some white Krylon on 1/8" non-glare, lasered the image, then sprayed black Krylon over that to achieve the final result. It took me a couple tries to get it right, 1st time was too deep/dark(my ULS settings using 1 60w tube-40p, 80s, 500ppi), 2nd was too shallow/light(20p,80s,500ppi), but now I could see where I needed to be so I started with the light setting and ended up doing 2 passes, maybe not perfect but good enough for what they wanted. The client was very happy with it.
I thought I would share this since I don't think I've seen it done very often and it's a fairly cheap easy way to do a photo image IMO.
Some other lessons I learned along the way. Flat paints tend to dry faster than glossy paints. Several light coats of paint are always better than one heavy coat, some technique is important here because you want the coat to lay-out as even as possible, if you get uneven streaks of paint it will translate to the lasered image. Let paint dry for at least a few minutes between coats, heat/fan helps. For the second color, lots of very light coats, if you go too heavy with a solvent based paint on acrylic you could potentially "craze" or crack the acrylic, also you have the potential to lift the previous color of paint, especially if you put it on too thick and didn't let it dry properly! (this is why doing the first coat right is important)
Hope someone can use this to success.
Paul
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Originally Posted by Paul Phillips
