I had a photograph that I wanted to laser engrave as a souvenir for remembrance after a day of working on board a ship. Having just a photograph for display was just too ordinary for me. I wanted to create something special – a laser engraved photo image.
I realized that many laser burned images that I can find renders light and shade by burning lightly or more densely according to the photograph. To me the result is not very nice. They can be quite blurry.
I used a method of laser engraving burning at the same strength to render both light and shades by varying the distances of the laser lines. This tends to make the images sharper and crispier. It’s more like half-tone images used in ink printing except that they are burned instead of inked. When the images are viewed at a distance, the lines merge to form light and dark areas.