Frustrated with rubber band framing - there is a box around my round artwork?

[dhouston951 (Damien Houston)]

hey guys ! im a new laser hobbyist and i have an atom stack a5 20w i picked up from an amazon auction
it has been very fun and captivating to say the least. i have tried burning all kinds of stuff and decided to take a leap at using lightburn instead of lasergrbl software since it is so limited in what you can accomplish.

i am having an issue framing an artwork i found online - it is round with a transparent background but instead of having bounding lines around the round shape it is boxed off ?

for example - if i draw an ellipse in lightburn the shape is round as identified by the hatch marks

but when i click on my imported graphic with obvious transparent background the shape is enclosed in a box

the red areas around my shapes are from lightshot and only used in screenshot to show what im talking about . these arent visible in lightburn just an FYI

when i try to frame my artwork to burn on a round piece of wood it just makes a large square around my material and it is difficult to frame

plz halp

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

That’s because it’s a graphic and the ‘scan’ is a square, as indicated by the ‘selection’.

See if this gives you different results.

This is not an image, it’s a dxf file.

Here is the result on a 12" square mirror tile. Lased the mirror off it then painted it black.

Being lased…

Good luck

[dhouston951 (Damien Houston)]

yeah that definitely fixed it.
im used to making transparent designs in .png format. with the basic graphic design experience i do have . are there ways to make the lightburn software ignore transparent area if i want to burn some previous .png art ive made or am i limited to this “framed” issue im encountering now.

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

It isn’t transparent, it appears white, at least to me.

I use Gimp to remove the backgrounds… probably available in your software also… Don’t know if that will actually fix the issue you are seeing…

There is also an image mask in lightburn, you can cut out an image…

[dhouston951 (Damien Houston)]

oh nice that might help me a great deal.
what is the symbol or option i can use to find the image mask feature ?

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

Image masking tutorial