New & Improved Engravings

We’re always working to make your prints faster and better. Today, we’re rolling out a whole host of new engrave options for Proofgrade materials. Here’s a quick guide to what you’ll find:

Detail and speed options

We now offer a variety of choices to let you pick the tradeoff of detail and speed that best fits your project. Not all choices are available on all materials, but you may find:

Draft engraves are designed to print as quickly as possible, while still giving good visual quality. For some purposes you may like the lighter low-res look; for others, you may want to do a draft engrave just to see how the project is going to come out.

Standard definition (“SD”) engraves are the default. These offer better detail and smoother edges than draft engraves, but are still not too slow to finish.

High definition (“HD”) engraves are now available. These offer the very highest level of detail, smoothest corners, and the ability to engrave truly tiny details. HD engraves are slow, and best for smaller prints where you want exquisite detail.

Engrave styles

We also now offer styles that are specialized for different types of source art. Not all materials support all styles, but you can choose from:

Graphic engrave: Graphic settings are optimized for vector art, sans serif text, and solid blocks of color. It’s great for icons, images that are pure black and white (with no grey), or images with a few solid colors.

Photo engrave: Photo settings are optimized for photographs, color or greyscale images, and images with gradients or lots of colors. You’ll need to pre-process your image for engraving (increasing the contrast and sharpening it) for the best results.

The old settings will be maintained for a week or two and then will be removed. We hope you’ll enjoy trying them out - we can’t wait to see what you’ll make!