 Today I'm going to show you how to take an image and optimize it for laser engraving using only one program to get really cool results like this. My name is Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. Now when you're going to laser engrave a picture you want to make sure it's optimized for the laser otherwise it looks kind of crazy. As you've seen in some of my other videos we've done this with many other programs but today I'm going to show you how to do it only with light burn. Light burn is super powerful it does a ton of things and one of the cool features it has is to adjust images right inside a light burn. Now I'm going to show you where to find the tool and how to use it in today's video let's do it. So the first thing you want to do is get light burn open like we have here then you want to go and open your picture so I'm going to double to click this one right here which brings in a huge picture of my son and I and this is a project we're going to do for my wife Lindsey. I'm going to shrink this down to about nine so it's much more manageable and I did that by going up right here to the width and I entered the width I wanted I'm going to scroll this down and scroll it in so the actual size I want to burn on this is eight by eight so what I'm going to do is actually go here and grab a square come to the bottom and choose the T1 this is right here this isn't a layer like a burn layer this is actually a tool layer and I'm going to make a square and that didn't work so we'll click T1 again and then I want to unlock the box up here click the little cursor here and it'll have my square highlighted I want to make this the size of the burn I want which is eight by eight and I'm going to grab that and bring it down here and lock this just like that so this cannot change anymore we have an eight by eight picture and I know that I want to fill this eight by eight because that's the size we're going to use for the burn now I made my picture a little bit too small so I'm going to click the picture in the background here I'm going to go to height and I'm going to go eight and hit enter so now what that does if I pull back on my mouse wheel it scrolls it out that brings the height of the picture to eight and you can come up and it'll snap in once you get close so once you have your orange square in here because that's the square we're going to use you can if you want you can adjust the picture through here kind of wherever you want it in my case it's not bad right there but I'm going to do some more in a second now I'm going to click here and highlight the whole project the square and the picture I'm going to right click and apply mask what that does is show you a crop and if I click out of everything I can click in the center and drag my picture around until I'm happy with that crop do I want to see more of this side do I want to see more of this side I'm probably going to go more like this so I get a little more of my son in there and a less of my arms on the left there okay so once I'm happy with that picture I know it's eight by eight it's in the size I want to do I want to right click and choose flatten so now that incorporated the picture into that square so now we are cropped if you're getting value out of today's video please hit that like button below to help share it with the rest of the community it really helps the video and the channel now back to it now I want to click the picture so it's highlighted right click and adjust image this is the whole reason why we're here today this is such a cool feature in light burn I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so you guys can see it better so I have been testing on scrap pieces of wood and I know the settings I want to use but I want to walk through these real quick with you just so you can kind of get an idea on the left side is going to be the original on the right side is going to be how it's going to burn so you can choose all the different types of burns here with the pictures you can use a Jarvis if you want a Stucky you can dither it if you'd prefer to dither it in our case you can do a newsprint as well which is just like dot or not it's kind of just like a newspaper is printed I guess that's the best way to say it in my case I'm going to use half tone and that kind of looks like this I'm actually using my CO2 laser my diode laser is in the process of being reset up I moved it and I don't have it set up so in this case I'm going to use the CO2 laser which I know does not have the same amount of resolution as my diode does but that's okay so currently I have my cells per inch just out to 80 oops if you hit enter it'll close that window so don't do that you can change this you can do 40 you can do more you can do less what it does if I zoom in you can see this it's takes how many cells are actually per inch so if I make this 90 you'll see a whole bunch more dots go in there and if I make it less like 60 the dots are a lot less or bigger in those areas so basically it adds a whole bunch of dots inside each square inch I believe I tested at 75 I'm going to use the angle at 22 and a half some people change this to 45 which just change the angle of the dots as far as how they burn I'm going to leave it at 22 and a half because that's what I tested on the line interval here this is going to set your line interval and your dpi I know with my CO2 laser 0.1 is fine I can go probably a little bit less than that and be okay too I'm going to use 0.1 I know that on my diode laser though not my CO2 laser my diode laser I usually use something like 315 dpi which is 0.081 but my CO2 laser just doesn't have the resolution for that so I'm going to leave it at dpi of 254 or 254 and a liner of 0.1 now we get to the fun stuff so your contrast your brightness your gamma what is all that well if you play with these sliders you can see if I slide this way up it gives you a whole different look your contrasts your blacks and your whites all together if I bring this back down you can kind of see it gives you more of the grays and the shading I know there's more technical terms but this is just a quick tutorial to get you rolling and learn how to use this image adjust tool I believe I've been testing at is 11 as far as the contrast I've been playing with the brightness a little you can make your image much brighter you can make your image much darker if you want I'm going to leave it at zero the gamma same thing you can play with that and kind of get a whole different look and my suggestion is check it out see what look you're going for maybe do a bunch of test burns to see which one you like the best and then we have what's the enhanced radius over here so this is kind of like your sharpness you can turn the sharpness way way up and then you can actually pull some in or you can bring the sharpness way down and kind of give it a mix what I like to do in the testing I did is I did a nine sharpness and I believe I did a 50 enhance so you can see it's a little sharper but it's not crazy again I'm using my CO2 laser so you know don't want to get too detailed otherwise I won't see it when you're all done with your settings you just want to hit the okay button here and that will save all of these to the layer you selected on your picture so if you didn't select a layer yet on your picture I'm using layer 10 it's just what I've been using for testing you can use one two it doesn't really matter which one you use if you right click and go to adjust image and just double check everything is the same and it is hit it okay if you change your layers once in a great while those settings will change it usually doesn't but you never know so now we're good now the only thing you have left to do here is select your power and speed here I did a bunch of testing I know that I want my max power set at 50 my men power set at 15 and that's that so once you have your speed and your powers done everything else is right here that we did the image the cells the half tone angle the number of passes we're only going to do one and this is going to be all set up I highly suggest when you get your picture dialed in make this image much smaller like two inches by two inches or something and do a couple tests on a piece of wood and you'll kind of get an idea of what your picture is really going to look like and then blow it up and do it on a big project like we're going to do here so one other cool thing if you right click go to preview it's going to show you what your project is going to look like it's going to show you where everything is going to burn in here if you zoom way in with your wheel there if I zoom back out it's kind of going to give you an overview also it looks like this is going to take me 25 minutes to do and that's eight by eight now this is pretty fast it's on the co2 laser on a dial laser this would be much much slower but that's okay because you get a lot higher resolution on the diodes you can actually hit play here and see how everything is going to move and how it's going to burn if you want to watch the whole thing you can grab your slider and slide it up and just kind of watch how everything is going to burn in there I'm just going to hit okay at this point it is ready for me to send it to the laser so I'm going to go get my piece of wood aligned and shoot it right over to that laser if you need to know how to align your piece there's going to be a video up in this area so after this video go ahead and jump on and watch that one so I'm going to go start this burn and we'll be right back with the results and through the magic of video boom there it is like you saw in the first shot of the video this is a piece of hard maple and this is how it turned out now it's not too bad a little dark up in my eye area so I can work on settings there I have tested this quite a bit I made some mistakes on the back here and I tested it on a small piece of wood with a whole bunch of different settings I even did a square grid over here for power and you can see here I did a bunch of spiders too well here's the deal I have never done a big picture on wood before I know there's a bunch of wood hacks that make these even look better and those will be coming up in the future I cannot wait to test those but overall this is not a bad thing I think this is a great start to learning the image adjusting tool in light burn and if you play with it you can get some really really cool things I mean the details are here you can even see the tattoo on my arm over here which is really cool I just need to lighten up my side over here so you can see my face a little better and I'm definitely going to learn that the image adjust tool will be great for pretty much any images you do whether it's on wood canvas coasters anything you do and I just wanted to give you guys a quick demonstration of how to use it I'm actually going to take this picture drop it in the CNC cut it out in a heart shape and give it to my wife Lindsey because I think she'll love this this is just one of the many things that light burn does it's such a cool tool it's such a powerful tool and if you haven't seen this one right here you definitely want to check that out because that is an awesome project