Hello, I don’t have a laser yet, but had a question about some of their abilities, such as laser engraving murals. I have read on some other post that the main problem is keeping a high resolution on a large area. What I wanted to know is, would this be a problem if you were doing silhouettes, or line art, or is it just with photographs? I was wondering about the possibilities of doing a country scene or farm scene in silhouette for a tile kitchen backsplash. Another question I had was about the difficulty of spreading a picture out over several tiles. Is this something that can be done with software one tile at a time or would I need a large table laser to do jobs like this? Thanks for any help.
Black granite is a great material to produce murals for kitchens. TO form a mural, you need a laser big enough for the individual tiles, so you either need a laser which can hold 12″x12″ or 18″x18″ since these are the standard tile sizes.
The limitation on a mural is resolution, so if you have a vector file drawn in illustrator, corel or other vector program, the sky is the limit on how large you can go. On the other hand, if you’re doing a photograph, you can only blow it up so big before it becomes too grainy. Surprisingly, a 35 DPI image will make a decent halftone, so a 1,200 dpi x 800 dpi image could blown up to 3′x 2′ with real nice resolution, but any larger you start to notice. If you pushed it, you might be able to get another foot out of it.
This is one of the reasons I bought a fuji s2 camera, it can take photos 4,096 pixels wide to a 10′ to 17′(wide) range mural.
Another way around the issue is to take the photo with a 35mm cameras and have a high quality 8×10 made, then scan the image at 600 dpi to get a 6,000 x 4,800 pixel image. 14′-25′ (wide)
If you have a true 1,200 dpi scanner, it could double to 28′-50′ (wide)
To go past that you need a larger negative than 35mm and a professional level scanner.
I’ve done a 5′x4′ mural of Mount Rushmore from a high resolution photo I found on the web. It’s nice!
Assuming you’ll use CorelDRAW to run your laser, take our word for it that the process of “paneling” a graphic is very simple and almost bulletproof. You’ll find numerous resources for “step by step” on this, so unless someone requests, we’ll not take the space to detail here but would provide links when you get ready for them.