Laser Engraving Photos

Engraving photos on various materials can be an awesome alternative to just printing them on paper!

Here are some tips for creating beautiful laser engraved pictures (confirmed to work on plywood, but should be rather general):

• it's very important to convert your photo to grayscale and desaturate it (e.g. using GIMP or Photoshop) - people have to look like ghosts
  • this is because your substrate, unlike white paper, will likely make everything darker
• (optional, but beneficial in many cases) remove the background or at least make it even fainter than the part of the photo you are interested in
• open the altered file in Visicut or another laser cutting program and apply the appropriate engraving settings for the chosen material as usual
• check that you don't have large areas that are to be engraved completely or areas without engraving, but varying densities of points everywhere
• zoom in on a critical area with high contrast - eyes are nice for that - and check again
• (if you haven't edited the background) try to estimate how well the background is separated from the main part of the photo, i.e. is there a clear difference in point density?
  • if not, think about removing or altering the background again

If you are interested in more details, please let Lukas know and he will do his best to add pictures as soon as possible!