When I got my new eufyMake E1 UV printer last week, the very first thing I wanted to print was this: a wire-haired border terrier printed directly onto a laser-cut wooden Christmas bauble.
Not just any wire-haired border terrier, though. This is Padgett, my mum’s friend Paula’s dog. I started with an ordinary photograph of him that my mum emailed to me.
It’s not even in focus! So I then used ChatGPT to create a slightly cartoonised version of that image, but with a transparent background.
Next step was to use CorelDRAW to add the name “Padgett” underneath him. Then the final step was to print the image straight onto a laser-cut wooden bauble. Amazingly, my first-ever UV print came out almost perfect. The colours were vivid, the fur details were clear, and it had some lovely 2.5D textures:
The mystery of the white fringe
Unfortunately, since that first print I’ve never been able to reproduce the same result. Every later version has developed strange white “whiskers” or a pale fringe around parts of Padgett’s face, fur and back.
The colours are great. The dimensionality is, too. But a lot of the edges are wrong. Instead of the nice dark outline I somehow got on the first bauble, I’m getting a visible white fringe around the outside of the dog.
Is it the white underbase?
One possible suspect is the white underbase.
UV printers often print a layer of white ink underneath the colour layer, especially when printing onto coloured, dark or transparent materials.
The eufyMake software has a white choke setting, which is supposed to pull the white underbase slightly inward so that it doesn’t show around the edges of the colour image. So I tried changing the settings for the white choke. But that didn’t fix the problem.
Could the transparent PNG itself be the problem?
Another possibility could be the edge of the PNG file. Unfortunately (for the sake of UV-printing purposes) Padgett is very furry. His outline is full of tiny wispy hairs and semi-transparent edge pixels. Which is exactly the sort of thing that can confuse image-processing software. A file can look perfectly clean on screen but still contain partially transparent pixels around the outer edge. If the UV printer then creates a white underbase underneath those pixels, the result can be a visible pale halo.
So my latest experiment has been to create a cleaner-edged version of the same Padgett image, with a darker fringe rather than a pale one.
Nope, that didn’t work either.
Could a software update have changed something?
There’s another possibility I haven’t ruled out. Since that first almost-perfect print, the eufyMake software has been updated at least a couple of times. So have the updates changed the way transparent backgrounds or white underbases are processed? Given that the first print worked and the later ones didn’t, I do wonder whether something in the image-rendering process has changed.
Documenting the failures
It would be fun to only write about the successful UV prints. But that would give a false impression of what learning to use a UV printing machine is actually like.
So I’m currently on attempt 7-ish of a Padgett image, and still have no idea what is wrong. Could it be…
- the image file
- the material
- the white underbase
- the software
- the print settings
- the printer maintenance
- or some mysterious combination of all of them
At least I know the machine can produce a really good result, because I’ve already got the first bauble sitting in front of me as proof. So now I just need to work out how to make it do it again. And, ideally, how to make it do it reliably.
Until then though, I’ll keep experimenting to see if I can get poor Padgett to print perfectly again…