Welcome to Engraved Pets Laser Engraving!
Our specialty is engraving photos into wood and granite using industrial laser equipment and software. Lasers have been around for a long time serving many industries like medical, industrial and even commercial arts applications. Unlike the laser pointer your cat or dog might chase around, industrial lasers are thousands times more powerful and can be used to engrave photos into many materials.
Our lasers use an intense beam of light which is focused to a point about the width of a human hair. This concentration of energy is so intense that it can vaporize many materials instantly on contact. Combined with a computer and some sophisticated software, that beam of light can be programmed to fire millions of little dots to create masterpieces in wood, glass, marble, leather and other materials.
While laser engraving a photo into a material can be quite technical in nature, we do all the work and provide you a wonderful piece of art to enjoy. First you upload your digital photo and select the text/options you want. Then we adjust your photograph and size it to the product that you want engraved. This is a very important step because the laser can only burn so many “dots” in a given area. For instance, a 5″ x 7″ plaque consists of over 3 million dots the laser has to burn to make a quality photo. Your photo will need sized, cropped and even its DPI adjusted in many cases before it can actually be used for engraving.
Once we adjust the size of your photo to match the product you want, we then adjust the color. Lasers do not print color, they fire a high intensity beam of light at one point. Depending on the color in the photo, the power of the beam and the length of time for the beam on that single dot has to be exactly right to render shading on a piece of wood. Darker colors are converted to dots with more power, where lighter colors of course would have a lower power burst of light to create the laser engraving. Because wood actually changes color as its heated from light brown to black, its possible to get ‘shading’ on wood with a laser using this high/low laser energy process. At the right power level wood can even be vaporized into nothing, thus how our engravings have a 3D texture. We vaporize just the right amount away to give it a nice texture while also shading in the right areas. (Where on items like glass or marble shading is impossible other than a frosted look or the original glass color. On those materials shading can be simulated by putting the dots closer together to look darker, or far apart to look lighter.) For photographs, the best results are on wood, leather or other porous materials.
Finally, when the image is processed we can move on to the final step. The laser ready image is setup in another computer software package which is connected to the laser engraver system. On this system we center your image on the plaque to make sure its going to look perfect when engraved. Then we take the power of the sun and engrave! If you were ever evil as a little kid (like I was..lol!) and burned ants with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day….well, working with lasers is the adult version of that!! We all love our job here and always strive to make every engraving really nice.
It takes about 30 minutes to engrave over 4 million pixels on a small plaque. Larger pieces can take 1-2 hours depending on the size. From start to finish its 100% hands on by an expert to carefully process your photo and engrave it on a piece of wood.
Give us a try! We promise you won’t be disappointed!
If you are looking for other engraved items which are not pet related, check out our main website at https://www.TurnerEngraving.com. We have a full selection of photo engraved plaques for graduations, birthdays, weddings and other special occasions.