Dialing in the best settings for your laser when you're doing an
engraving can be confusing at times. In this video, we're
going to go over the basics to get your engravings looking
great.
Hi, my name is Gil and today we are going through setting up an
image engraving, the theory behind how engraving works, as
well as how to work out the best settings for whatever material
you're planning to use. But before we move on, if this is
the first time you've joined us here exploring laser technology
in life, then drop me a quick Hi there below in the comments, so
that I can say hello to you on the next laser live stream.
Using a laser, you can cut and engrave a whole bunch of
different material. Some people place images on tiles, cork,
acrylic, wood, and even more. When you start working with your
laser, it can be hard working out the best settings to get
your images clean and crisp. Now whatever material you're
planning to use for your project, boys, make sure that
you know what it's made up of, and check the safety data sheet.
If you don't know what the material is made of, you can do
a quick test to make sure that it isn't made up of chlorine
that could damage yourself or your machine. If you haven't
already, check out this video on how to test the material. Now
the secret to getting a good image engraving is to find the
sweet spot of your laser. The real key happens to be with
speed and power combined to give you a strong engraving that
isn't faded or burned. Regardless of the power of your
laser, these two factors can be used to create the best image
possible. The way this works is that the slower your laser head
moves around the material, the deeper the engraving is on the
material, as of the energy being transferred from the laser has
more time to burn into the material. And what this means is
the faster you move the laser, the less time the energy has to
actually etch into the material. Now I know what you're saying,
No problems go, I'll just run my laser really slow and get the
best engraving possible. Well for some material that can cause
you to burn through the material or even set it on fire. And it's
just not practical to run your laser for hours on end and end
up with an engraving that looks like you've just painted the
material about black paint. So let me show you a test I run to
work out the best speed and power settings for my project.
And for that, let's jump into Lightburn.
Alright, so now we are back on the computer about to fire up
Lightburn probably this I got to be honest with you, I love
Lightburn and Lightburn is a lot of fun. So let's go and jump
into Lightburn. And let's go through what I do to set up a
test for engraving. Now a lot of people can do it different ways.
I'm just gonna show you the way I do it. It's a little
different. I know a lot of people love to burn grids. And
you see these little grids have different kind of shading in
little boxes take a little bit of time to do that use a little
bit of material. As I said, this is the way I do it. And let me
share what's going on. So first of all, I'm going to grab my
artwork, I call this a engraving test pen. And we're going to
find that in good old art library started organizing my
library a little different, I have an engraving area now,
where I'm going to start putting a lot of my engrave images and
I'm going to grab my engraving test pattern, it's going to drop
it in there. Now this test pen I got from the doc the labs
website and I have a link below to the website. So you guys can
grab this image if you want to use it and follow along. So this
image, as I said, I call this like an engraving test pattern,
I kind of like this, because you can see instantly it's made up
of a gradient of shades. And they're all labeled. So they
start at 5%, which is about as wide as you're going to get. And
100% is as dark as you're going to get. And the whole idea is to
set up the test patent so that we can get as much of the
gradient in the final result. also like the fact that this
test patent has font sizes so you can test if you're using
really small font, you can see what that's going to look like
on your final piece of material. And then that goes from six to
12 points. So again, it's giving you a little bit of information.
I also want to point out this kind of, I don't know it's four
wedges. But what I like about this is if you've ever done
photography, it's a little bit like a test card. So in here,
you have four different shades. And these two, this one right
here I'm going to do it above it. So this one and the darkest
one. These are the ones that I look at the most if I can't see
a difference between the darkest and the next one across. I know
I have set my engraving power way too high. So again, seeing
this type of pen on a piece of material instantly gives me all
the information I need. If I'm missing a lot of information,
let's say from 5% to let's say 45% if This is all white over
here. I know, you know what, I haven't spent enough time to
sway too fast. All right, let's bring it down a little bit. If
I'm looking here at 100, and from 60 onwards, it's all solid
black, way too much power, maybe it's the lasers moving too
slowly. Or maybe I can crank down some of the power depending
on how much latitude. So this is the piece, as I said, that I
use, often, what I do is on, on this one, I'm going to actually
just gonna bring it down, it's gonna make it a little bigger,
it's gonna move it to the side here. Now for the material, I'm
going to use this test, I'm going to make my life a little
hard. I'm sorry, I've got to challenge myself. So what I'm
going to use is I'm going to use the yellow cardboard, melina
folders that used to get at school, we used to put all your
loose leaf a4 pages in, I like using these, especially when I'm
testing things because they're cheap. And if you make a
mistake, you will see the results of really, really
quickly. And in fact, I'm going to show that later on in the
video. So I'm going to use these folders. Again, if you want to
go through these steps, easy to get a hold of very cheap, stick
them in the laser, and see whether or not you can replicate
the same results. So I'm actually not going to just do
one test, I'm gonna do three tests here, I'm just gonna move
it down this a little bit. So we have that we'll duplicate it,
grab another one.
duplicate it again. I'll show you why in a second. And I'm
just gonna quickly line them all up, you know, you know what, you
know what I'm talking about, oh, I did the wrong one. Always.
Does anyone else do that I always get the wrong one first.
There you go. I know the settings for for this cardstock
that I'm using. But I don't want to just say these are the
settings follow along, I want to show you exactly what it is that
I do. So I'm going to ignore all the library settings, I'm going
to change it not even look at it. Here I'm going to start
setting up different types of tests. So right now they're all
on the same layer, I'm gonna grab a second one, I'm going to
put it on a blue layer. And on the third one, I'm gonna put on
a red layer. So now I can put individual settings on each one.
And I also went in and kind of scrubbed the settings, one of
the things that I like about lightburn is it remembers the
settings that you put in last, which means it works really,
really well. But if I've tested something out, and then I come
and bring it into you, to show you guys and the settings are
all there, well, you know what, what's the what's the use of
actually going through it. Now that we've got these test pens
on different layers, let's go into the cut settings, editor
and let's start putting some speeds and power. And as I said
before, this is really the key to it to this very first one,
what we're going to do is we're going to put in 2500. So 2500
mils per minute, is going to be our test for this pace, we're
also going to make the speed sorry, the max power 100.
Because you don't want the faster we can get this done, the
better it is to get the next engraving on. So we're always
looking at firing the laser at 100%. And then using the speed
to see whether or not we can get it in the right area. Now the
other thing that I'm going to do for this test is I'm going to
choose the image mode is really important, whatever image mode
you're going to use, feel free to test that. So normally I use
grayscale, I'm actually changing to Stuckey and I will do that
for each of the tests. number of passes is one, I'm not going to
touch anything to do with the line interval or resolution,
we're going to come and talk about that in a future video. So
that's all set up for the first one. I like to also grab a
reminder of what it is that I'm actually working so I don't have
to come back into lightburn. But we're gonna do that here. Go
select that again. I'm gonna just move that over there. So
just reminds me Gil, what you did here was you set it up for
2500. The next one, since I'm in the text is 200. And I'm going
to make this 115. So you guys, you can see exactly what I'm
going to undoing here, most we're going to quickly just
select all of these and put it on its own or layer. Because
otherwise it's going to have a bit of a problem. So we're going
to make it a fill. Actually, we're gonna make it a line, well
I don't need I don't really need to fill this it's just going to
take up more time. So what we're going to do is I'm going to put
this on its own separate layer, we'll make it green. And then
that line is I'm just burning things. Let's move this up to
3000 All right, oh 3000 air assist is off. We don't want to
be blowing out one pass we're looking like we were going with
gas as I say. Let's get to the to the next layer here. So we're
going to open up the settings. I'm going to first of all make
sure that it's at stucchi. I am now going to put in 2000 and max
power is 100 Guess what I'm doing for the last one. Same
thing again. But this time 1500. It's that simple. We're going to
read 100 to just quickly check this out, make sure that
everything's all on the same readings with grayscale. No, we
want to put it on to Stuckey, just want to check that's a line
interval is one 150, it was the other one 150, right, and just
double checking 150. So they're all at this right same kind of
line scan interval, or otherwise known as dpi. We're ready now to
actually send this to the laser. So I'm going to go and do that,
we're going to come back and discuss the results of this
engraving test patent. Let's go into it.
Now while my Emblaser 2 is ru ning the testing graves, I'd li
e to invite you to hit that su scribe button, and bell icon, so
you don't miss out on all the di ferent videos that will be co
ing out around laser projects an Lightburn. And while you're at
t, you have a personal inv tation to come along to the las
r live stream and share your pro ects with us both here on You
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e description below. I can' wait to see what you're maki
g. Let's go back now and see ow those engravings are comi
g out.
All right, and using the speed settings of 20 502,015 100 mils
per minute, at 100% power, I got a mixed bag of results which you
can see here, it's clear to see which speed settings came out
the best in this test, which was 2000 mils per minute. What I
love about this chart is that you can see what is being
engraved at the different power levels. And on this example, you
have a gradient of tone as you cycle through 5% to 100%. All
the tones are crisp and clear. So you lose little shading
starting from 85% to 100%. Now in the higher power range, the
card stuff does get a little chart so keep an eye on that.
Now with the 2500 mils per minute test, you can see that
the laser was moving so fast, it didn't have time to create a
gradient before getting to around 75%. Also, the markings
around the chart are faded and kind of hard to read. Now when
we slowed down the laser to 1500 mils per minute, he burned right
through the cardstock leaving nothing of the engraving
attached to the card. Unfortunately On the flip side,
all the markings around the chart are solid and clear. So we
know the laser was was working hard removing a little too much
material. For a lot of people, this test would be enough to set
up an engraving at 2000 mils per minute. But I wanted to show you
all what changing the max power setting and do to fine tune your
engravings. So I set up another test and this time I set the max
power at 80 instead of 100. And you might be surprised by the
results. Just like before, we had similar results at 2500 with
the faded test patent and even at 1500 we burned cleanly
through the material again But with 2000 mils per minute, we
see some fine tuning across the power spectrum, there is no
charring of the material at 100%. And we get a clear
engraving spectrum is a little lighter than our first test. The
big difference is that there is no difference between five and
15%, which all blends into a very light wide range. We can
also see the four color chart in the lower middle is clearly
distinguished on this test, unlike the 100% power test. Now
I like to think of speed as the overall volume of energy being
transferred in the power setting is like the fine tuning that can
be achieved by really honing in the effect you're trying to
create. As for which setting would I use? Well, that depends
on the project and personal choice. I'd feel confident using
2000 mils per minute with either 100 or 80% to get a clean
engraving on some cardstock. Now you can use this test on any
material you're engraving, I normally keep off cuts of
material I'm going to use to make sure that I can get the
results I'm looking for. And now you too can create the best type
of engravings you want with your laser. There is a few more
things that you can dial in to improve your engravings and we
will be discussing them in a future video. Till then, I'm
going to go back and experiment a little bit more with this
engraving technique. And I invite you to come along and
check out some of these videos right here about lasers and
Lightburn. But for right now yo have what you need to go an
create something amazing actually real soon with som
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