3018 Pro - Basics for Laser Engraving

hey everyone and welcome to another episode today we're going to be going through some of the basics of laser engraving so let's get started so today we're going to walk through some of the basic steps of taking an image like this getting it processed and prepped to an image like that and then finally getting engraved onto a piece of mdf now hopefully at this point your laser is already set up and ready to go but if it isn't do follow the link in the corner to the previous tutorial where we walk through setting up your laser finding the focal point and doing a few tests i would probably also suggest doing the one before that about tuning your grbl settings as well because at the end of the day the better calibrated your machine is the better the output's going to be no matter what task we're doing now going back to the laser engraving there is a lot more emphasis on the preparation of your images than the actual laser settings yourself they're still both important but the better you prep your image the better the output is going to be and that's where we're going to start today is preparing the image ready for the laser so let's move over to the computer and start to see what we need to do so the first thing i want to do is explain why the preparation of the image is so important now lasers can only output in basically black white or different variations of gray using its power scale so there's nothing stopping us from opening any image up in laser grbl and just working with it straight away but if we look at the image we're about to work with today and open that up you'll see as soon as we open it but it's a little bit flat there's not much definition to it when you flick over to the original obviously baxter pops out a little bit more because he's a different color to the everything else around him but when you go back to the grayscale it's flat everything blends into one now you can mess about with all these different settings up here but there's no way that we're really going to get baxter to pop out in relation to the rest of the background and this is where the preparation comes into use because what we can do in photo editing software is a lot more than we can do within these laser programs so what i want to do first is head over to a website called that's g-i-m-p dot o-r-j link will be in the description as always now if you're familiar with photo editing software you've probably heard of something called photoshop this is basically a free equivalent to it and even though it's free it is still very powerful so you click on the download button and you've got two options available i'll just go with the orange one because it's easier to download directly from them now the file is quite big as a result i've already installed it and set it up and so we'll open that up now now obviously you can do any of these edits in other software if you have photoshop or alternatives to it then feel free to use those but i'm just using this for the example today because say it is pretty powerful now don't be put off by all of these different things around it can look quite daunting but for what we're going to do today it is quite simple and it's also worth mentioning that we're only going to look at the features we need for these photographs there is much more available so do go and google or youtube various tutorials if you want to learn more so we'll start by loading in the photograph of baxter we go to desktop layers of video and unedited backstab open if you know anything about photos what you probably realize is that what's called a raster image and what that means is the photo is made up of hundreds and thousands of pixels and if we really zoom in we can start to see this just lots of little squares and each square is a color and that's what gives the image the definition a bit like building with lego basically each block is a different color and that's how you build up the image itself the reason this is important is because when you're working with raster images different um outputs treat them differently so for example things on screen are often 72 dpi what that basically means is there is 72 of these little squares per inch but when you're outputting to something like a printer they are 300 dpi 300 dots per inch now we have to basically imagine that the laser is like a printer so we want the image to have 300 dots per inch at a minimum i say to minimum because you can take it higher but we're going to work with 300 today so the first thing we need to do is tell this image to make sure that there is 300 pixels per every inch so if we come up to image come down to print size and here we will see we've got the size of the image and then how many current pixels it's currently measuring so we're going to click on this and take that up to 300. now as you can see it's readjusted the size in proportion to how we're regrouping the images and regrouping the pixels what that means is it doesn't distort anything on the image it's just basically telling it to interpret those pixels in a slightly different way so we'll click ok now the next thing i want to do is crop the image down to the um the relevant size that i want so we're going to connect to the crop tool and we're going to work with the fixed aspect ratio because i want this to be a square image so one to one is basically the ratio that we need to be square obviously you can change that if you want to do something like a landscape or a portrait image and i also want this to be 100 millimeters by 100 millimeters so we'll set that to millimeters go 100 by 100 oh sorry 100 by 100 there we are so we've draw a quick square on here now we can reposition this and enlarge it and it stays in proportion because we've told it to remain at a one to one ratio so we'll move that a bit basically what i'm trying to achieve here is i want baxter to be in the middle but i want a little bit of a border around him just so we can start to edit that shortly and then we hit enter now we can just focus on the area of the image that we want to really bring out the next step we're going to do is basically try and sharpen this up a bit whilst the image is still good quality when you apply a sharpened filter it can often just make things pop out a little bit more so if we go up to filters then come down to enhance and then come down to sharpen unmask and there's lots of settings in here that we can play with and i'll try and show you basically the differences between them now now we can move these up and down as you can see basically if we take it back to the beginning it it looks okay to begin with but the more we take the settings up everything just starts to become that little bit crisper now you can really overdo this and if you take them all the way to the top you can get an effect that particularly i don't like others maybe it's not what we're after today so we're going to bring these down to a more reasonable level now the good thing about as well is you can put a split view on so you can see what the original image looked like versus the settings we're applying now and what you can also do is have the preview on or off now there isn't a huge difference there but you can just see like the edges of the first that start to kick out a little bit more i'm just going to pop that up a little bit and we'll turn it off and on again now as you can see the more we take that up it starts to make the original image actually appear quite soft so it's good that we're doing this because it's just giving everything more edge to work with so at that point we'll click ok now the next thing i'm going to do is convert this to grayscale as i mentioned earlier a laser can basically only output in black white or gray so it's better for us to work with the image in grayscale rather than trying to edit it in color because it gives us a better idea of what we're actually dealing with to achieve that we go up to image mode and then come down to grayscale right at this point what we want to start to do is actually clean up um some of this around the outside i'm not too interested in the background it's really backs where i want from this image so zoom out a little bit more what i should say um obviously there are various ways to control the zoom you've got a view and zoom option up here where you can you know choose your different settings but if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel on you can simply hold control down and zoom in and zoom back out it's often easier than trying to do the keyboard shortcuts or the menu options so at this point what i want to do is erase a lot of the outside of this image so baxter starts to become the main focus so we're going to come to the eraser tool here and click on that and we have lots of options that we can control with this uh eraser tool if i come over to the screen itself i'm going to zoom in you should be able to see that dotted line around the cursor what that is is the size of the brush that we're using if i take this off you'll see that gets bigger and then obviously if i take it down it gets smaller again there are a few other settings that we can play with as well the main ones that we'll need to focus on today is the hardness now the hardness basically is how harsh the edge of this circle is now just to really show this what i'm going to do is take that down to be very soft and when i click that you'll see it's a very soft um effect that it's applying if i just undo that and if i take the hardness right off what it should do is basically it's a very crisp clean circle that it takes out like that so what it's actually doing is feathering the edge of the brush that we're using to give a softer edge let's undo that and base that's what we want to work with at the moment so i'm going to zoom out i want to use quite a harsh edge to get rid of as much detail as possible the other thing you can also do is if you use your um square brackets on the keyboard and hold those down you'll gradually see that the size of the brush increases as well now i take out a lot of this background now it looks quite messy to begin with but you'll see what i'll do shortly to start to soften everything back off and just roughly go around him taking it as much as we need to now the more you take over the harder brush it just makes it a little bit easier when we start to soften the edges shortly now what i'm going to do is take that down the other way and really start to have a soft edge and just basically fluff this up a bit and make it so it's much softer to work with i'm going to go all the way around the edge now what i want to do is i want to leave some of this in i don't want to basically i don't want to um get rid of all the background so you can just see baxter's fur because i want to leave this dark edge in to give him some definition against the background or against the material that we'll be working with in a bit so it's going to work all the way around this image softening it up i'll probably speed this up on the video now so at that point i'm pretty happy max is quite clear we've left this bit of an edge around him so he doesn't isn't going to fade into the material that we're burning onto he'll have more definition but what i want to start to do now is actually look at defining the blacks and the whites within this image basically starting to look at the contrast brightness and the levels if we come up to colors and then come down to levels now basically what this is defining is the range of the black and white that we have in the image and what we want to do is basically make the the blacks a bit dark and make the whites a bit whiter and start to make everything look a bit more contrasted so if we pull these into the edges you can see the range by these little white areas here we want to start to bring that in closer to where that's actually working and sometimes you can't take it too far obviously we start to lose detail within backseat himself there so i'm going to pull that back and you can also move this little middle one and that starts to adjust the mid tones as well now this really is personal preference but the purpose of this exercise the site is to start to give everything more definition between the blacks and the whites so that the laser can output it a bit better so i've probably taken that a bit too far i'm just going to pull that up and pull that back in there we are and click ok so you can do the split view again if you want to see what the previous version looked like compared to the new filter we're applying and straight away as you can see everything just starts to look i would say a little bit harsher but that's kind of what we need for that laser to output a better result so we're going to click ok there you can also go up to colors and start to play with the brightness and contrast if you feel more comfortable doing with this there are some differences between the levels and the brightness and the contrast into the way they um adjust the particular colors and tones within the image but you can play about with all of them until you get the effect that you're after again we'll click okay because i'm pretty happy with that i assume it's going to up the contrast a little bit more and click okay now what i do have in this image is a couple of dark spots obviously he's always go pretty black you lose some of the detail in his nose and also on his vervet so i just want to try and pop these out a little bit more so they're not too dark so what i'll do is come to this tool here now when you first open this for the the first time it may be on smudge blur or sharpen but the tool we're interested in is the dodge tool and what this will do is lighten up some of the dark areas by if we select shadows down here and we basically want to lighten up the eyes now as you'll see that's probably too big of an area to work with so if we hold down the square bracket key on the keyboard again and start to shrink it down until it's about the size of his eye i'm also going to zoom in on this a bit so you can see it better it starts to lighten them up a bit by enhancing the dark areas i'm also just going to do this a little bit on his chest and on his nose you don't want to bring it out too much but you also don't want it being completely black when you engrave it i'm pretty happy with the image at that point i've probably done the nose a little bit too much it is coming out quite light at the moment but what i should stress at this point is you will need different settings depending on the type of material that you're working with and there's no real way to figure that out until you start experimenting with your own lasers so for example if you're engraving on something like wood you will have different settings than if you're engraving on something like a toilet but at that point i'm happy so what i'm going to do is come to file and come down to export as and save this as a new image so we're going to come down and come up and call this edited baxter now or final back store actually click export so that's just because i've deleted the jpeg off the end so i'll add that back in dot jpg what's worth referencing at this point is lazy grbl will interpret jpegs slightly different than it will png you will have a few more options when interpreting a jpeg so i often do think it's better to save as that file format and we'll keep the quality quite high keep all the snatch settings as default click export so at this point we're going to head back over to lazy grbl now before you really start engraving with the images that you're using i would advise doing what is called a bit of a grayscale test and the way this works is we're going to file and go open i'm just going to load in this engraving test here for the purpose of explaining it now basically what this is if i show you the original image it's just showing you a full gradation of pure black all the way back to pretty much pure white obviously five percent isn't pure white bridge pretty close and the background is all white now we need to try and get these settings as best we can for the laser to interpret that in order to output it as close to a full gradation as possible and the way we do that is by starting to adjust speeds and power and also some of these parameters for interpreting the grayscale images so if i switch back to the preview mode what we can start to see it's done a fairly good job of interpreting it with these settings that it's already on i'll just play about with them to show you what happens obviously as we dull it down these segments here start to fill in because it's interpreting it as a bit of a darker image similar with contrast it will move them about and then what the white clipping does is selecting the highlight point so if i hold this down you'll see everything that's white starts to turn to pink now this gives you a good indication of what's white and what isn't and as you move that up and down as well it starts to make um some of the darker areas more white we'll bring that back down to where it was the reason this is important is because you want to try and get a good gradation between here but the reality is not all lasers are really going to be able to output out at these lower settings to my knowledge a lot start to fade off around the 30 mark if you have a laser that can output to these lower settings and still mark while you're doing five and ten percent and that's bright great but obviously a lot of the uh chinese diode lasers that we work with struggle to really mark the material at these lower settings so what you're basically going to try and aim to do is have probably the first couple of segments as white and then a good graduation around the rest of it so we'll just take that back down and take that up a little bit and there we are we're happy with this now what we'll do um actually i'll quickly explain some of these settings so you've got two real different ways to open when you're engraving an image you've got line to line and as you can see on this image it is literally doing the whole image by left to right lines you can switch that between vertical lines or diagonal different ones will get you different effects depending on what you're doing sometimes people often believe a diagonal line will get you a better and clearer image basically because you're it's easier for the eyes to interpret i believe just put that back on horizontal for the moment another option is this one bit of black and white dithering now if i switch that over you can see basically the way it's interpreting the images now is by dots and everything's either a dot or it's not and the amount of dots in a particular area will define on how dense it is or how dark it is and therefore you know whether it's black or white now this effect can be quite useful again depending on what type of image you're working with but for today's tutorial we're going to stick with the line to line the tracing now if i come back down to this line option here so we just will leave that on horizontal but the quality is also important now this is defining how many laser lines are drawn per millimeter and it also affects the quality of your output now as default i think it probably loads in at about five but it's better to take it up to about 10 now that might seem overkill but you'll get a much crisper image the higher this number is the other thing to remember as well the higher this number is the longer a job will take so for example if this was five and we took it up to ten pretty much doubling the time it's gonna take to uh produce the job at the end because you're adding five extra lines per milliliter for the whole entire job so yeah five to ten basically you're doubling the time now on the next screen we can start to look at the power and speed settings of the laser itself now if you've done the previous calibration tests and the setup you would have had some idea of what your laser can run at versus the power and what you want is a some mid point as to where you can monitor maximum power but have a good gradation in the um in the different power outputs that it does now for me this is going to be running at 800 millimeters per minute the next thing you need to take a look at is if by default this opens up at m3 switch it over to m4 because that just can control the um power of the layers a bit better the s minimum and the s max we've spoke about this in previous tutorials this is based on what your dollar 30 sign is now what that basically means is it's a figure that the software and the control board can work with together to control the power of your laser again in the previous video we know that mine was set to 1 000. if you've done the same you should also be set to 1 000. so obviously for the laser to be off and not running we want that at zero but for maximum you can either have that at a thousand but as i've said previously i don't like to run um any of my lasers or spindles at full power so i have that at 900. basically what that means is the laser is never going to output any more than 90 percent power now what we can also do down here as well is redefine the size of the image that we're working with we're going to leave that 300 dpi as already mentioned because that's a good resolution to work with but for this particular image as well i want to output this at about 60 millimeters so again that's set to 60 you can make it bigger you can make it smaller but 60 mil is a good way to start because it doesn't take up too much room and it also doesn't take too long to output so we're going to click create now what you can basically see is that has converted the image into something that can now be output by the laser and again the darker red lines is where obviously things are going to be darker colours on the mdf and the lighter areas will be lighter you can also see on the measurements the size that this will output to now this always fills the screen with the size of the um the actual drawing but it doesn't mean it's going to output that it will output to 60 ml as we can see because it's got 60 down here now i'm quickly going to show you what the output of this may look like obviously i've already done it several times in preparation for this video but you should definitely do it in order to get an idea of how your laser is outputting now if it doesn't come out the way you want it to basically you just have to keep coming back reloading the file in and adjusting the settings you've got these settings to play with and then you've also got the settings on the next page to play with in terms of getting your layers as close to possible as to output in a full gradient try and adjust these settings where possible because this is more accurate as to the definition of the laser whereas this is just how it's interpreting the image if that makes sense so you want to adjust your speed settings and your power settings to get this as a full gradient but what we're basically aiming for is obviously the black to be black and the white to be white when i say white that means the color of the material underneath so when you put the grayscale image you should have something like this but it's a great example of how even my setup isn't perfect because as you can see it really drops off when we get into these lighter segments i've got the dark area and there's a good graduation all the way around but it just literally drops off here now i did a lot of testing before this video to try and find a way to fill this in correctly as well so it was a smooth gradient and i mean a lot of testing so what i did here was just kept running it one after another changing different speeds and power settings until i got something i was happy with now as we can see up here this was at eighteen hundred millimeters per minute at a hundred percent and we've got the dark areas but it drops back off at 25 percent and then this one down here was at um 1500 at 25 power and we get the lighter areas but the dark just really wasn't dark enough so i kind of had to accept that i was going to get one or the other the dark areas or the light areas and this here is a perfect example of where i've took the speed too high and it kept missing steps now while we're looking at this it's a good idea to talk a little bit about material as well the reason mdf is a good um substrate to work on is because one it's cheap but it's also a fairly flat color so the laser is going to be quite consistent when it's um doing all of its lines when you start to look at something like wood now wood has grains to it and between the the actual grains and the bits in between there will be different densities so as the lasers passing over them it will burn or engrave slightly differently as it goes over the different grains and the different fibres now this is probably more emphasized with something like this scrap piece of oak that i've got because what we can clearly see here is the wood itself has two different tones but then within the grains there are also these dark lines so if you're engraving over something like this you're probably not going to have as consistent output although the actual texture of the wood may add something to the image so you have to weigh up what is going to be the best option for when you're engraving and this is often why people start to engrave on things like ceramic tiles because it's a flat color and a flat surface and therefore a much more consistent burn obviously that's something a little bit more advanced that we'll cover in another tutorial so if we come back to the image that we're going to work with today i'm just going to cancel this i'm going to load in the image of baxter as you can see that was the one that i'd done previously it's probably not as a higher def higher contrast as this one but we'll use the one we've edited today anyway and that loads baxter in now if you can see if we're using these settings that we used on the previous grayscale gradient this is how it's interpreting backstab versus the original image it's not that far off it's never going to look exactly the same because it's interpreting it in laser lines and it's just a rough idea of what it may look like again we can come in here and start to play about with those settings depending on how much detail you want to fade out but i'm going to roughly leave it where it was and again because we've already done the grayscale test we can leave all of these settings the same as well then we'll move over to the next stage and this is just another example of why we do that grayscale test to begin with because we know all of these settings are going to be correct for what we're outputting and there we have our file ready to output now what you can see straight away is the preview screen that we just had off didn't look as good as it starts to do when it opens up in the full um the full preview panel and this is just because the way the software works this is a better representation of what the laser is going to output versus the previous screen because it is just a preview screen at the end of the day it's a bit of a guess of how it might look so with the image of baxter ready we can now take a look at the laser itself get the mdf in place and get it all connected and ready to go so for the purpose of this tutorial i've used a fairly big piece of mdf and the reason for this is i can just do multiple examples and show you what change in the settings look like so let's see if we turn the laser on there and then we'll connect lazy grbl to the machine so we know that ding means it's all connected now what i'm going to do is position the last head over here so that we can do a test here change some settings and move it over one very important fact i've just remembered is that when we created this image it was set at 100 mil not 60 mil so i'm just going to go back and re-import that quickly i'm going to select the same image of baxter the good thing about laser grbl is it remembers the same settings that you had last time so if i click next and i'm just going to re adjust this to make that 100 mil as it should be because that's what we set the image at there we are we can now see that the measurements of ray and the edge have changed and that's the size that we wanted to output at we can also see down here the estimated time and that's what gave it away i saw that that was only seven minutes whereas i knew it should have been much longer than that so what we're going to do now is position the head over in the bottom left corner we'll move this along a bit and pull that back and what you can do is turn on obviously the focus just to make sure it's roughly in place we might bring that a bit close to the edge there we are and we'll set the zero point at that turn the focus back off and there we're good to run this image of baxter so it's not too bad it's come out probably darker than i would have expected part of that is down to the mdf and the way it's burning but i think i also left the edge of baxter a little bit too harsh or more than i would have wanted to so what i might do now is go back re-edit the image and soften the edge and just run this again just try and get a better result so i edited the image i changed a few settings and i did get a better result but i'm still not 100 happy i think part of the reason is the fact i'm using the mdf it's great for testing but you're never really going to get the best result that you can i think i also need to figure out why my laser is struggling to hit the lower end of that grayscale because once i do it will just give it a much broader spectrum and therefore get more depth to the images but hopefully you will have better results with your own setup and at the end of the day the tutorial really is about giving you the confidence to experiment with your own equipment keep doing the same test just changing the power settings changing the speed settings and find a point where everything comes together make sure you keep track of those settings though and when you're happy move on to something else try different material with a different surface because as i said earlier the laser reacts differently to all the different types of materials that you're going to work with now before i wrap today's tutorial off i just want to say that i recently set up a patreon page patreon is a great way to be able to give back to youtube makers such as myself who provide all this knowledge and information for free i love making the tutorials i love helping everybody out on the different forums that i'm active on but at the end of the day it does cost money to do the upgrades to get the material to keep everything going so anyone that can donate i'm really grateful for and i just want to say thank you up front now that is the end of today's tutorial as always please comment below let me know what you think if you know how i can solve that issue with a grayscale that would be a brilliant help but until then i'll see you all on the next video

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 117,816

Keywords: 3018PRO, 3018 pro, 3018 pro CNC, CNC, CNC for beginners, 3018, 3018pro build, 3018 pro assembly, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, building 3018, building 3018pro, testcut, test cut, first cut, CNC software, Using 3018, 3018 beginner, 3018pro beginner, cnc enclosure, 3018 tips ticks, cnc tips tricks, cnc help, laser, diode laser, cnc laser, laser help, setting up a laser, laser issues, Laser engraving

Id: pCmazk-yTVo

Length: 31min 36sec (1896 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020