 We engraved our AI image and we'll show you what we learned right now What is up a welcome back do you like to do a builder to make it? So do we and we have new videos each week So be sure to like leave us a comment subscribe and hit that bell to be notified of our new videos Today we're doing our top 12 tips for laser engraving how to get them dark crisp and clean This is a follow-up to last week's video where we did some Prepping for some laser engraving this week's video We're gonna show you everything that we learned in the order in which we learned it so that you can do a perfect engrave as well Tip number one choose the right tree wood does matter we started with pine We ended up moving over to a different type of wood Woods like cherry and alder and basswood are soft woods and then you can use a hard wood as well And that would be something like maple and birch wood does matter You're gonna get different results with different types of wood There's different grain patterns different grain density and different types of resins We ended up choosing maple it had a great green pattern. It was a light colored board So it's gonna give us good contrast with the engraving Tip number two no need to be too fast or too furious So for my first engrave, I just went as fast as I could with a hundred percent power That was not the way to do it. So if you go too fast with too little power You might not get any image too slow or too much power and it's just gonna burn up your image So we ended up tinkering with our settings. Yes, you have to do we got a nice burn We did several tests So we got a nice burn and we ended up going with 200 millimeters per second and 50 percent power Tip number three your image You want to start with a high resolution image if you're doing something like photo engraving If you have a low resolution image Something that you've maybe grabbed off of the web and it's a very small photo You're gonna have issues with Pixelation your edges are going to be rough and they're not going to get a clear Beautiful engrave so the higher resolution image that you start with the cleaner your picture is going to look the more detail You're going to be able to see Conversely if you choose a high resolution image for a tiny engrave You may have too much detail for something so small You won't need all the extra detail if it's going to be very tiny anyway So you're gonna want to balance that image resolution if it's going to be a large image You want that detail if it's going to be a small image a little less detail will be fine Our image was seven and a half by 42 inches long We had a very large image that we were going to engrave so we needed to ensure we had high dpi So we are at least 300 dpi for our image when we exported it tip number four Proper focus height if your laser is out of focus you can get some burning. It'll look blurry Or it can even have uneven depths The best focus point is where the laser looks the smallest or the thinnest on the board It looks like you drew on it with a pin if your laser beam looks fat or you're having a fat line That means you're out of focus. We are going to use a two inch lens We're going to clean our mirrors and we're going to do a ramp test to make sure we have the perfect focal height Tip number five have enough material for testing now that you know what your image is going to be You know that you're going to do what woods are going to use now You have to test the engraving now the board that we were using is a maple board and It is very expensive right now So we did get a little more than what we needed because we knew we were going to have to do some testing and We knew we were going to size our image down or just take a Like a cross section. Yes of our image to do some testing So that we could make sure that we're testing on the same material that will be engraving on tip number six Keep it clean. You got to have a nice clean wooden surface Sand it down wipe it off. You don't want any excess dust. You don't want any piles of debris You don't want any oil spots on it. You want a nice clean even surface so you get a nice clean even engrave tip seven a Little bit of air assist So when you're doing an engraving or when you're doing any laser cutting You want to use that air assist that helps keep a clean cut in a case where we're engraving wood You don't want that air too high Because it will take away the char that the engraving is trying to put down on the wood It'll also make the laser beam burn a little bit hotter in this particular engraving You want to dial your air assist back? We typically cut at 15 psi We dialed it back to 5 psi because we did want to blow away a little debris from the engraving and a little air Assist will keep that smoke away from your lens But we didn't want too much air and then we didn't want it getting too hot Tip number eight a darker image is not always a better image So I thought I needed something dark with a lot of contrast So that would show up on my laser engraver, but I was wrong You need to go ahead and balance your contrast and your brightness Until you get a good balanced image all the way across You don't want super dark blacks and you don't want super white whites You want to try to keep them in the middle so that your laser has something to work with when it starts doing its dots And something to keep in mind in this case We didn't use this method, but you can just file this away for testing in the future You can always break your image up so that certain parts of the image are on different layers in this case We were using a photo so that didn't really work But if you're using a vector engrave You can put darker areas on one layer and lighter areas on another layer And you can adjust the settings for each layer tip number nine light burns adjustment tools So while Garrett modified the brightness of the contrast over in Photoshop before we ever exported the image We also did some image adjusting once we brought it into light burn You can go into light burn and use its image adjustment tools to again adjust the brightness and the contrast But also the gamma adjustments gamma adjustments Adjust those mid tones without affecting that brightness and that contrast So we had to tweak those right inside light burn as well to get that image just where we wanted it So that it was dark enough in some areas, but light enough in others so that when it engraved We could really see that road come out and pop out of that image on the wood tip number 10 Activating dither mode so dithering is just a technique using little dots to create a black and white photo Using shades of gray with little dots kind of like a newspaper or a comic book if you zoom in It's just little dots same thing. So light burn offers Several different modes for dithering the most common are Jarvis Stuckey and Atkinson So Jarvis is good for details and like a good smoothness Stuckey is good for like a good balance of black and white with a smoothness and Atkinson is good for a light or spaced out dots We went ahead and use Jarvis because we were looking for some good detail But with a smooth gradient tip number 11 11 Tip number 11 optimizing your line interval so in light burn It's actually called DPI, but what it really is talking about is lines per inch or The spacing in between the lines So a higher DPI is going to give you more lines per inch But a lower DPI will be fewer lines per inch now you're thinking with a photo engraved You're gonna want higher lines per inch or a higher DPI But do you So in our testing we found that the higher DPI or the higher lines per inch This one was at 300 and you can see it really burned it out It was just too long and too much It wasn't really about power on this one because the difference between this one and the beautiful engrave on this one Was simply the DPI. We changed it from 300 to 180 180 tip number 12 Post-processing once your engraving is done. It's time to clean it up make that thing shine You're gonna have some residue you might have some smoke residue Resin residue you'll definitely have some debris inside. So blow that off with some candare Maybe you wipe your image down Or even a light sand over top to help pop it out once you sand it hit it with some candare again You could also add some oil lacquer or varnish Know that we'll change the color of your wood which may change the color of your engraving could make everything darker Did you learn anything? I mean we learned a lot with all that testing we were able to I Feel like next time We'll be able to dial it in even faster Oh, yeah, I like we've already learned some of these things But maybe every image is a little bit different and I think you might have to tweak it for every image this is photo quality and You'll you know to get some of these details. I mean we really worked on this cross-section over here to really make sure that you could see Trees grass hill landscape the road, you know, yeah, I had to make sure it was all Visible once it was done, but I think I learned a lot my top takeaways Wood matters and a higher DPI doesn't always mean a better image. Yes Yes, that was the that I think that was the most surprising take away for me Me too Big thanks to all of our patrons. Thank you. We love you guys And that is the best way to support this channel Join us over on patreon or we have all of the files that are in our store all the files that we use in our videos Most importantly, we have an awesome community here to help you and we're here to help you if you're a new laser or Engraver if you're new to lasers, then that's the place you should be there's a whole Slua folks a whole group out there willing to help and willing to share ideas like a giant mastermind of people with this different expertise I'm about out of time. I have to go get this in the mail You have to go do something productive and we will see you next week where we'll do it building to make it again I don't think that's a good idea. I think it's a great. I'm in it's too late. Okay. I'm in this one's an easy one It's just a very expensive board You