 Today we're going to burn scratch paper with a laser. My name's Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. So like I said, today we're going to be playing with scratch paper. Now scratch paper is pretty awesome. It's actually just like a card stock of paper with something on the bottom. Most of the time it's like rainbow and then a black top that you etch off. You can kind of see that here. And a lot of times you just get a stick like this. It kind of looks like a toothpick or a big toothpick. And you would just literally hold the scratch paper and you scratch it off. And you can draw like that. And it's really cool stuff. But today we're going to be using lasers. And it's so much more fun to use lasers on this stuff. Now don't get me wrong. If you're good at drawing you probably would love to do it with a stick. But I'm not good at drawing. So today I'm going to show you how to take an image, process it and then put it on the laser. And then in the end we're actually going to end up with this. Now this is a gargoyle. This is on silver scratch paper. As you can see the metallic silver kind of shining through. This is one of my favorite things that I've done so far on scratch paper. I really like this. And it's kind of hard to see how metallicy it really is. But it really stands out especially in person. So I'm going to show you how to take a flat full size sheet and turn it into that gargoyle. A lot of times it's rainbow. And that's what I showed you in the beginning of the video. It looks something like this. So you can see the rainbow in there. And it actually is pretty sparkly on my side. It's hard to show that in the camera. But you can really do some cool stuff. Like this particular one I did on the scratch paper. This was for a contest I just was having some fun with. And it actually did the full photo right in scratch paper. As you can see and I think that looks really cool. There is a ton of stuff that you can do. And today I'm going to show you how to take an image, process it and burn it right on scratch paper. Let's do it. What we want to do first is go get an image. And you can use any image you want. I just happen to like that gargoyle. So I'm going to go to gargoyle and go to images and Google here and find the gargoyle image that I like. Now the ones with the black backgrounds or the white backgrounds, they're going to be the best ones to use because they're easiest. So I'm going to stick with that. I'm going to click on the gargoyle I like. I'm going to right click and save image as. I'm going to type in gargoyle. And you can see I already did this. We'll just overwrite it and we'll say yes. And we're good. Our image is now saved. Next thing I want to do is go to a site called imager. IMG-R. What imager is is it's free image processing online, specifically for lasers. So you click in here and this is a totally free to use. But it's always helpful if you help donate to the cause. He does a great job keeping this up. And there's always updates. And this is a really cool tool and it's totally free to use. The link will be in the description below. So what we want to do first is go over here to our red box. Click it and that's going to upload the picture. So double click our gargoyle. We're going to come down here and you're going to see the gargoyle. Currently the height is 1200 pixels by hitter 53 by 72 dpi. We need to change that for burning it on a laser. So the next yellow box here is crop. So if you click on that, you're welcome to crop this any way you want. You can do a rounded crop. You can always change how that looks. You can use a square crop, which actually only crops in a perfect square. If you're using a tile or maybe a square piece of 4x4 scratch paper, this might be a good way to do it. So you fill the whole piece of scratch paper. In our case, I'm going to leave it full size and I'm going to hit close. Now what we want to do is come in here and resize our image. I'm going to go to inches. You can use millimeters or pixels. And in my case, I'm using eight and a half by 11 paper. So I'm going to type 11 because I want to do it landscape. So 11 inches wide. And as you can see, it did 7.82 tall, which is maintaining that aspect ratio because we didn't crop it. Now I want to use 318 dpi. I do this because I have a diode laser. I know that between 300 and 318 is a great place to be with a diode laser. 318 just does great pictures for me. We'll hit OK. It's going to process in the background. It'll flash. And if you scroll down, you should see both. Now this is the original on the left and this is the new one on the right. And that is getting closer to being able to burn this right on our laser. So then we scroll up here. We click the blue box right here and this is where the magic happens. Now we want to use the Norton algorithms. This comes straight from Nicky Norton himself. He's the godfather of the white indelible tiles. He is the master of this kind of stuff. And he is working with Imager to come up with some really great algorithms. We're going to select Norton white tile painted black. And the reason why we're going to do that is because technically it's just like a tile that's painted with black over the top when we're using this scratch paper. Because really you have the colored paper and then you have the black scratch part on the top of it. So we're going to use Norton white tile painted black and we're going to hit OK. Now it's going to work for about 10 seconds or so. And then this is where the magic is. If we scroll down you can see that it went through the processing with through the algorithm and it came out with this file here. That's going to allow us to use our laser and burn this file. It's going to burn anywhere that's dark and it's going to leave any of the light spots in the white around it not burned. So this is exactly how you want it to look. Anything you want burned needs to be dark on these on this output. Anything that you don't want burned should all be in white. So we scroll up and we're going to hit save. I like a PNG. So we're going to do that and you can see it's saved. And then what we want to do when we're completely done with that image we're going to hit this pink or a purple button here. And that's going to refresh the page. It's going to start completely over. If you go down it'll give you a little bit about the page and the instructions and then what each of these buttons means. From here we're ready to go to light burn. So let's jump over there. What we want to do next is open up light burn. And I use light burn. You can use anything you want to use in this tutorial. We're going to use light burn because that's what I prefer. Light burn is a super powerful program. You can use it free for 30 days. The link is in the description below. It's not an affiliate link or anything. But I think you'll love it once you use it. So then what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to click the little square here and I'm going to draw a rectangle. I'm going to go up here and I'm going to make that rectangle 11. And we'll do 8.5 because that's what size our paper is. And I'm going to lock that ratio in. So we know that it is 8.5 wide and 11 tall now. That's the size of our sheet of paper. Next what I want to do is click this little button here which opens to import a file. So I opened the gargoyle. We just created an imager and this is how it looks within light burn. So I'm going to rotate it by grabbing the corner here and rotating around. And you want to make sure it's straight up and down. Then I'm going to grab it and kind of center it right in our 8.5 by 11 sheet. If you want to check if you click out here, 8.5 by 11. If you click in here just a little bit smaller. Like when we made this file remember it was 11 by 7.8. So then I want to highlight everything and I want to come up to the top where little bullseye is and click it. And that's going to center everything together. So from here what you want to do is center this in your build area of your laser. And I'm assuming you already know how to do that. If you don't go check out that tile video that I linked earlier. I go through how to center the tiles and that is the same process as here. So I'm going to put my laser right in the center. I did that by clicking this little button here and clicking where my origin is. In this case the job origin for me is in the center. I like to do the center of the job. That way I know if I center that piece and it's straight. Then it's going to be straight on the material every time. Once I'm ready what I need to do is dial in the settings for our image. So go up here to image. We're going to double click right here. Now it already knows it's an image because it's a PNG file. So in this case most of the time this is how it's going to look. We want to make sure that we click pass through. The reason why we're clicking pass through is because we already did all the processing off of light burn. We don't have to do anything in light burn. So we don't have to use any of the light burn settings. Now light burn is very powerful. You can do a ton of stuff in it. But for this video I wanted to show you the easiest way to get there. And this is the easiest way in my opinion. Another big thing you want to do is make sure your laser is very focused. And in my case I focus it on every material I use just to check it. What I'm going to use is 3200 speed and I'm going to use 35% burn. I'm going to use 3200 speed and 35% burn. It's going to pass through which means it's going to use the processing we did in image. It's not going to use the light burn processing. You may have to play around and do some tests. But I found right around 3,040% or 3,235% depending on how deep you want to go on that scratch paper. And every scratch paper is a little bit different. It's coated thicker or thinner. So you might have to play around and dial your settings in. But for this video and for my tutorial here let's use 3,200 and let's use 35 max power. Now you could use 40 and you probably would be just fine. In this case I know my laser and 35 did a good job as we saw with the gargoyle earlier. So we hit OK. Now we are ready. We have our job lined up on the bed. Everything's ready to go. All we have to do now is hit the start button and it'll start burning this project. I'm going to jump into a time lapse and I'm going to show you how to do that now. So I moved this a little bit. I took the coasters out that I used to burn this on to get it right into focus. I'm going to push my gantry to the back just like that. As you can see the gargoyle burned into the scratch paper. It's kind of dim looking, not exactly popping yet. And what we need to do now is actually take some sort of cloth. I like this microfiber a lot and just give it a good wipe. We need to bring out that color, get all the soot off. And what that's going to do it's going to bring out that gargoyle quite a bit. So I usually go both ways. And there is a lot of soot. As you can see that's what we just wiped here. And so I usually go once that way. I go once this way. After we wipe it you can see the gargoyle pops much better on this paper. Now what I want to do is give this thing a shot of some satin clear coat and let's see how it looks. All right now I'm outside where I'm going to paint. And you can actually see how awesome this looks in the light here. It is super metallic looking. In the camera there you can see as I move it the different shades and everything that we got. This really came out awesome. What's going to make it even better is when we throw some clear coat over it. Now I ran out of gloss. I'm actually going to use some satin clear coat. This is the same stuff I used in my last video. Except for I used a gloss clear coat in my last video. But that's the Rust-Oleum 2x Ultra Cover Satin Clear. It's shaking up very well. And I'm going to actually spray it just like I do the tiles. I'm going to go one coat this way. And then I'm going to come back and do one coat this way. And I'm going to let it dry just like that. One thing about the paper you don't have to worry about the paint reacting. So you don't have to go quite so thin when you're finishing up the scratch paper. So here we go. You always want to come all the way across. So we're going to go like this. Kind of good coat that way. And it is kind of windy today so that doesn't help me. But one good coat that way. And then I'm going to come across this way here. When we're done with the clear we just want to let this dry. You can see all the glare going on now that we put the clear on there. But since it's a satin once it dries it's really going to actually tone it down. It's not going to be so glossy on that black. And that's all you have to do to finish up your scratch paper after it's burnt. I think this looks awesome. All right. So you just saw the post processing. You saw me wipe it down carefully with the microfiber both directions. You saw me clear coat it. You can use a gloss or a satin. In this case I use a satin. I think in the future I'm going to try a gloss. Why not? I just had the satin ready and I was out of gloss unfortunately for this project. And now it's completely dried. And like I showed you before this is what we have. Now as you can see the metallic is bouncing off from the silver scratch paper. The link is in the description below for the silver, the gold and the bronze. And this is our final product. Now this is with the satin finish. If this was a gloss finish I think this would even pop more. But I really do think the gargoyle looks really cool even with the satin. It just it pops out of this paper. And especially depending on what angle you look at it's super metallic. And I really like that. There's a ton of cool stuff you can do with scratch paper. We made a gargoyle today and it was really easy to do. The image processing takes five minutes once you get it down. Just be careful with licensed images. You don't want to get in trouble with anyone. This is for entertainment use and for tutorials. That's why I use the gargoyle I did. If I were to sell this I would either have to get permission from the artist or draw myself or make my own pictures. Which is totally cool too. One of my favorite things that I've done speaking of my own pictures is this picture right here. So this is a picture of my son's pouty face on rainbow sparkle scratch paper. I just thought that was a really funny thing to do because it was just kind of ironic that he was pouting. And it was a rainbow paper. There really is some cool stuff you can do. And you find that your pattern on your scratch paper changes depending on which way you turn the paper. And you never know what it's going to get. So it's so much fun with the mystery there. Don't forget to experiment. Maybe take your larger sheet like this and cut it into smaller sheets and do an experiment on one just to get your speed and your percentage down. That way you know when you go into it you're choosing the right burn and percentage. And remember when you do a picture you want to choose a percentage that is going to reflect the deepest part of your burn. When you're looking at that picture in light burn as we saw it was it was all black where it burned out right. The places where it is completely black is where it's going to use the max or close to the max percentage your laser. So in those places you want to say okay in this area right here is where really we probably hit that 35 percent. Everywhere else was a lighter shade and that's what's going to happen. So that's it. In today's video it was real easy. We showed you how to go from this to this using a laser and scratch paper. It is so much fun. You can do any pictures you want on these and it's only limited to your imagination. I hope you guys learned something today and as always keep printing. What's up everybody. I hope you guys loved the video today. A little bit different. I'm sitting down. I got the backdrop. It's crazy behind me because there's a ton of stuff going on back there. But if you liked it give me that thumbs up. Hit that subscribe button and maybe the bell right over here if you want to get notified anytime we go live on Monday for hot makes or anytime we put out another great video. Have you seen this one?