Trying to learn to use the laser engraver. I took a picture, converted it to greyscale. Imported it to Luban. Used the grey scale settings and the ones to burn on the piece of wood that’s provided. The image comes out completely burnt with nothing but black.
When I look at it in the edit tab of snapmaker laser it looks fine, when it moves to process it gets much much darker. Once I move it to Workspace, its darkness changes when I scroll in and out. I have tried adjusting the edit setting to make it lighter.
One thing to keep in mind is the workspace is showing you the toolpaths, so the actual result that prints may have some greyscale effect to it though.
Its likely that you will need some fine adjustment of the beam to have better success on that, but
I THINK (havent actually tried the laser yet) greyscale is kinda limited on the machine based on how many dots per inch are made instead to kind of generate the illusion instead of having different intensities,
I know that it can be made to do greyscale as someone has modified the firmware to accomplish that, but i dont wana lead you down a bad path so i am not going to recommend that at this time as I am not familiar enough with it.
What are your settings? As a new member you probably can’t share a screenshot yet, but if you can or from an external link.
You probably just have it at too high of a power or too slow.
Also, some photos just make terrible laser versions. It needs to have good range of contrast and definition. If it’s at all dark it won’t work out well.
The preview in luban doesn’t really tell you anything. Well, at least at first it’s not useful.
Now that I’ve played with it I can tell more what to expect. But it’s really showing the tool path rather than trying to simulate what it will actually look like.
I don’t see your settings for power & speed.
But that’s a really dark image. It’s going to take quite a bit of testing and a very narrow range that’s going to turn out well. I’ve seen images like that turn out, so it is possible, but it isn’t easy.
What you should do is take a small section (or two). Like around the eyes or the sword. Use your graphic program to crop just to that size. Repeat that image in Luban 10 times or so. Start with 1200mm/m, 5 dwell, 10 density. From my experience that’s a good middle place to start. Vary the power from 5 to 80. Then run and see what happens.
From there you can either decide you like a power setting. Or run another pass with a narrower range based on results.
Or run a pass where you keep power/speed ratio the same. So 20% @ 1200, 40% @2400, 10% @ 600 etc.
You can also play with dwell time - lower numbers are lighter.
Some people might suggest playing with density, but that also reduces resolution. On a picture like this I wouldn’t want to lose quality. From all of my tests I end up adjusting the power an equal amount so there ends up being no benefit.
I have adjusted density to speed things up on vector when the passes end up overlapping because the burn is wider than the density.
-S