James,
Not sure what you did, but I downloaded the Vcarve photo software from Vectric and used the sample picture they provide (puppies). I carved it using a 90 deg vbit and while it did carve it correctly the picture was not really visible. I did the same picture again with a 60 deg vbit and it looked a little better but it was still not a good picture. The last one I did was with a 30 deg vbit and it was even better.
What I learned - FIrst issue was that when I generated the Gcode using the “G-Code inch” post processor I had to manually insert the G20 command to force the Grbl into inch mode.
Secondly - Carving a picture with this “raster scan” method does not produce a very good result. The main issue is that the depth of the cut is very shallow and most wood do not hold detail well using this method. You would definitely need some method of enhancing the contrast between the cut and uncut wood. For testing I spray painted the 60 deg test cut, let it dry and then sanded the paint off the surface. This helped, but the cut was so shallow that the sanding removed some of the material from the “cut” areas.
I think that some very high contrast photos with low resolution may be able to produce better cuts, but overall it does not look like a usable method for carving photos. The key seems to be getting a deeper cut in the material.
I think the real value of a program like Vcarve Photo is to make lithophane’s in a material like white corian.
I will experiment with that and see how it goes.
What I would really like to try next would be to convert a jpg picture to a depth mapped STL 3D image and then use VCarve Desktop to carve the 3D image. From the sample I have cut with Vcarve so far it seems to do a very good job , it really is amazing.
So James, I am not sure if any of this helps you, but it was interesting to play with the VcarvePhoto software to see what it would do. What was obvious was that the software does work, it may not carve a great picture, but the software does do a very good job of carving a raster scan image. And it does it very quickly. In my examples a 150 line raster image with a size of 3x5 inches was completed in about 5 to 7 minutes.