Decided to memorialize the fall of a fiend’s fallen comrade with a small piece of jewelry.  Up until now, everything I have lased has been purely vector format, so this marks my first foray into grey-scale imagery.

MSRaynsford had a series of articles where he was experimenting with reproducing grey-scale using a combination of power setting adjustments and halftone conversions for the photos.

I just went halftone, and adjusted the power, speed, and focusing distance until I was getting good blacks on the wood.

I went with MDF because it’s a uniform composition of wood; there’s no grain that will take different amounts of burning.  Plus the etching blows out the surface of the wood, so there’s no use in wasting wood with grain to it.

The final cut pass was generated by expanding the path around the photo, and came out with sharper corners than I anticipated.  I would have rounded them down with sandpaper, but then the parts I sanded down would be light exposed MDF contrasting with the blackened MDF generated after the cut pass.

Grabbed a fine silver (looking) chain from Michael’s, and it made for a fine memorial gift.

Lessons Learned
How to etch in grey-scale with a laser.