Source
r/engraving•
redgnuser

Help engraving black people?

Pictures of white people turn out fine, I'm looking for some advice regarding engraving pictures of black people. Dealing with a 9Tu-M044 Fiber Laser machine, and I'm trying to offer picture engraving services.

I've tested Obama, Snoop Dogg and Tupac, but I can't get the right brightness and contrast. On the contrary, engravings of Bernie Sanders showed clearly at a variety of settings. Landscape pictures also showed clearly.

The way this machine works is that if the picture is black, it engraves. Gray engraves lighter. Ignores white. White people need to be grayish in the image. Uses EzCAD2 as the engraver source. I use GIMP, Adobe Illustrator, and Inkscape, depending on the project.

Any suggestions for a nice engraving?

Posted May 16, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

56
heronmarkedblade1984•

Can you try inverting the colors? Or making it more about contrast? I'm learning hand engraving so I apologize but I know next to nothing a out the automated stuff. If I was going to do it by hand it would probably be easiest to do it as a bulino with lots of little "dot" cuts.

3
redgnuserOP•

Yeah, what you just described is the closest I've gotten, so far. After I posted that, I reduced brightness and used a GIMP edging filter, which essentially did the same thing. Boss man didn't like the result, though. Still looking for alternatives.

3
SmokinCache•

Try Allen West instead of the ones you mentioned. Much easier to deal with.

1
redgnuserOP•

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I'm looking for a method to ensure that any person's picture can by clearly engraved. Just messing with brightness an contrast right now. Don't know what else to do... :-(

2
SmokinCache•

It was a poor political joke.

Instead of just adjusting brightness and contrast try adjusting the colors inside a B&W image. Check out the link below.

We have not seen your work, but I would suspect your final product does not contain enough info between black at the far left of the histogram and white at the far right. I would also suspect your just packing your pixel data at both ends of the scale even worse as you adjust.

https://digital-photography-school.com/converting-images-to-black-and-white-properly/

2
redgnuserOP•

https://imgur.com/a/WOP9uR8 Sorry, here's a sample. The closest I've gotten is that Tupac pic on the gold iPhone, but still not good enough. And my boss is Jordanian, so in other words, he was pretty clear about how shitty it looks. Lol making me feel some kind of way.

Top pic is from taking Tupac on dark background and inverting the pic, then lightening brightness and reducing contrast. Middle pic is when I was messing with contrast. Bottom is from applying edging filters and adding brightness.

1