Using the Laser It white material black printing
This lesson offers a quick tutorial on doing a photograph on the new Laser it Material with your CO2 laser machine. This material is available from Engravers Express of Caldwell Recognition
Here is our original photo
Import you image into CorelDraw
Select Contrast Enhancement
Select EFFECTS | ADJUST | CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT
Contrast Enhancement Command Window
When you are in the command window there are a couple of things to note. The first is that if the preview windows are not open click on the two buttons at the top left to open either a single pane preview or a dual (1). I like the dual pane (2) and (3). The dual pane consists of the original image and the preview image that shows you the adjustments that you make. To see these changes make sure that the lock button (4) is engaged.
Make your adjustments in the Contrast Command
Because we are going onto a white material our adjustments need to be made in the whiter spectrum of the image. Adjust the top left slider (1) which will darken the darker shades in the image. Make only minimal changes here. In the the to right slider (2) bring the slider inwards. The adjustments need to be more extreme here. If you want to lighten up or darken the whole image you can adjust the Gamma adjustment (3).
We have now increased the Contrast of our image
The one important step in working on a laser photo is that we typically want to increase the contrast of the image. By adjusting these sliders in CorelDraw we have increased the contrast of the image
Sharpen the image
We now need to sharpen the image. Go to BITMAP | SHARPEN (2) | UNSHARP MASK (3)
Make our Adjustments
Our original image (1) and the preview image (2) are viewable. make sure that the lock button is on to see the preview. If the windows are not open click one of the view window buttons (4). We will be adjusting the Percentage (5) and the Radius (6)
Adjust your sharpness
In this example I have adjusted the Percentage to 404 (1) and the Radius to 3 (2). I typically do not adjust the Threshold (3).
Our image is sharpened
Here is our image sharpened. You can see that the image has lost some of its subtle grays which is what I was trying to achieve
Print the image
Here is the setup window for my laser. Speed is 100 (1). Power is 13 (2) on a 75 watt machine. The DPI is 600 as I am doing a dithered image. The table size is 12 by 24 (4 and 5). I have turned off the vector part of the job (6).
Here is the finished image
Here is girl lasered on the white laser it. Sorry for the line I only had one piece and the power was just not perfect. The black line is a 2% increase. I had started at 12 percent power but it should have been 13.
Was this printed with Standard Dither? You mention above in the print settings that you used 600 DPI since it was a dithered image. Also, did you print from greyscale mode?
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This image was a grayscale image and was printed as so. No diffusion pattern. As metal will hold a fine dot you print it as if you where sending it to a laser printer
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