 Today, I'm going to show you how to create an awesome project just like this using something called masking. My name is Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. The masking feature built into Lightburn is a very powerful tool. It is super easy to use. It's super easy to learn. And once you watch this video, you're going to be able to create some amazing projects just using that masking feature built right into Lightburn. You might be asking what masking is. Well, I'm going to make it really quick and simple. If you take a picture, lay something over the top with holes that allows you to see some of that picture through that masking. So you'll see in this tutorial how I took an awesome picture of the Guardians of the Galaxy, masked it using the word hero and then burned it on the laser. Let's do it. So the first thing you want to do is open up Lightburn like we have here and then go load the picture you want or whatever you want in the background. In this case, I'm going to use this awesome Guardians of the Galaxy picture here. Then the next thing I want to do is add some cool font. I'm going to go to the left here, click the font button. I'm going to click way over here and type hero, all capital letters. I like that a lot and I'm going to come up and find a font I like. Now for this particular one, I really like the Star Lord font. We'll call it the Star Lord font. So that's what I'm going to use. But find one that you like, find one that matches your picture and will allow whatever you want in. When you get your font here, you want to come down to the T1 at the bottom here that gives it just a tool path. This does not need to be a burn layer. So we're going to use that as a tool path. Now this could be anything. This could be a square, a circle. If I were to draw a circle here, I could do the same thing with this circle if I would have made it an actual circle or a square or whatever you want to mask with. So in my last video you saw me use a square to crop the image. It's essentially the same thing. It was making a mask to crop the image. I just didn't call it a mask. I called it a crop. So take your text and move it down and then we want to grab the corner of the text here. And if you can't grab the corner, come up here and hit this little cursor, but grab the corner and make it as big as you want. So something we need to know is how big the material is going to be. So you want to size this to your material. So the picture itself is just like that. We can size it all later if we want to. Grab your words, make it as big as you want, and this is where we want to position our word hero. So we get everybody's faces or whatever you want to see in each of these letters. Play with it until you get the exact picture you want. So once you get it exactly where you want, I think this is not bad at all. What you want to do is click out of everything, drag a box around and highlight, or you can hit Ctrl A that'll highlight everything. Right click and hit apply mask. And this is what you're going to be ended up with. Now the cool thing is if you do this and you're like, ah man I don't like where this is, you can click out of everything, grab inside of the picture and move it around until you get exactly where you want to be. In our case, I think right there is going to be perfect. Once you have it exactly how you want it lined up, I'm going to right click and I'm going to flatten this image that's going to officially crop it down and make it only the size of those words. The next thing I want to do is make this the size of my actual project. So once you size it to your work, in this case it's going to be kind of narrow, 5 inches tall and like 18 inches wide, 18.6 or 5 inches wide, which is okay. Once you have it all sized to the work you want to do, what the next thing you want to do is use what we learned in the last video, click the image, right click and go to image adjust and just make sure the image is adjusted to where you want it. In our case, it's not. So I think I'm going to bring this up to, I think I was at 10 in that last video. I think the brightness and the gamma stayed the same and I believe if I remember right, I did something like 9 over here and 50 in the enhanced. If you guys didn't see that video, oops, I hit the OK button. If you didn't see that video, check it out right after this and you can learn how to adjust your image in the image adjust tool. So what this does is it kind of shows you how it's going to burn and this is the original and this is what it's going to look like when we're done. I think that looks pretty dang awesome. I am going to go ahead and call that a win. We'll hit OK. Now you have your project, make sure it is set to a layer. I'm going to use layer 10 just because it's right in front of me. Make sure you set your speeds and your powers and make sure that that's all good to go. Now the thing I would do is shrink this way down and do a couple of quick tests. You want to do a test just to make sure it looks good on the material you're doing. If you've done that material before, you probably already know what your settings need to be but with pictures it's a lot different. The next part you want to do is go to right click and preview and just see what this thing is going to look like. Kind of gives you an idea of how it's going to burn in here with each picture inside if you zoom in. It shows you where all the dots are going to be and how exactly it's going to look when it's done. If I have all my settings correct it'll look pretty dang awesome. You can hit play here to watch the whole thing burn and see how it's going to work and how it's going to move and all that stuff. In our case this is only going to take about 35 minutes and 10 seconds. So we're going to do that right now. We're going to hit OK. I'm going to set up the material and get this thing burning and we'll be right back. And bam, just like that when you're done burning you have yourself an awesome project like this one. Now I use scrap wood on this. This is a piece of scrap wood I had laying around that I wanted to burn this image on. You can do this on anything. Whether it's tiles, coasters, canvas, anything you can burn you can use this masking feature right out of light burn to create such amazing projects. What I have to do is think about what picture or shapes or patterns or whatever you want to mask throw the mask over the top and hit that burn button. So comment below with what you would do with this masking feature or some potential projects you have in your mind because I would love to see them. Also if you got value from this video mash that like button. Hit the subscribe button right here. We're trying to get to 100,000 subscribers this year and I need your help. And if you're going to burn a picture behind your mask like I did don't forget to use this video right here before you do that.