fablab fantastic four
When I was experimenting with the laser cutter, I was impressed by the burning capacity of birchwood.
Birchwood is a very light coloured material, so when you burn it, the contrast is very strong.
I decided it would be cool to apply this technique to a face. Or better, to several faces.
Therefore I created an image of the current interns at the Fablab Amsterdam together with the manager,
and called it the 'fablab fantastic four'.
I used Adobe Photoshop to edit the images, but you can also use Adobe Illustrator for it.
I will now describe the steps I went through when manipulating this file.
1. Black and white
First I made the image black and white. the easiest way to do this is:
Image > Mode > Grayscale
2. Levels
It is important to remember that we are going to use the laser cutter. The laser cutter will change its power
level according to the darkness of the image. When it finds a white pixel, it will do nothing. When it finds a
black pixel, it will laser at the maximum of the power set by the user:
| IMAGES VALUE |
LASER RESPONSE |
| black pixel | laser at full power (set by user) |
| white pixel | no laser |
Values in between are scaled lineair (I think, but I am not 100% percent sure about this).
So what we want is an image that contains some white, but some black aswell. If it has no white it will be a very dark image. If the laser burns the birchwood a little, it still burns it. Therefore the birchwood will become
quite dark at low values of black.
To change the levels, go to:
Image > Adjustments > Levels
and changes the levels by bringing the three arrows closer to eachother.
This is one of the images that I ended with:
I did this with all the images, and added some text aswell. The final image can be downloaded below.
I put this file in the Laser Template and started lasering using the following values:
Laser Cutter values - material: birchwood 3mm
-- cutting
power: 100
speed: 0.7 - 1
-- ingraving
power: 100
speed: 20
The result
