I am wondering if anyone has any kind of preferences to a graphics program to use for their Lightburn projects? There seems to be some free ones, but they appear to be crap or I am just an idiot who doesn’t know how to run them. In either case, I am simple and don’t want to get something that takes an engineering degree to operate. This is all meant to be fun for me.
Depends on what you want to do.
For simple projects, LightBurn works well enough by itself. Most of the stuff I make looks like a bracket and comes directly from LightBurn layouts.
For more complex artsy projects, Inkscape has pretty nearly all the knobs you could possibly want, at the cost of an abrupt learning curve. It has the advantages (to me, anyhow) of being freely available and not locking me into a proprietary file format.
If you want to pay for such things, Adobe has a wide variety of highly regarded and increasingly spendy programs.
Beyond that, take your pick of CAD packages, all of which will be overkill for what’s basically a 2D drawing program. Caveat: you will need an engineering degree to make sense of the controls.
All of those are vector graphic drawing programs, not raster picture editors.
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In addition to Inkscape as [ednisley] says, look at Affinity Designer. Has a low cost and a much better interface than Inkscape.
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They both left out Gimp. It’s a good graphic program for manipulating specific areas. It’s free and open source I believe.
Generally program target a specific task. To be useful they have to ‘encroach’ on other programs areas. Lightburn is great and can manipulate photos well, but it’s not photographic manipulation software. I use these three the most and I believe they are all open source
What kind of files do you intend to manipulate?
I use –
- Gimp to manipulate photographs, such as dodge or burn a specific area, overlays and collage.
- Inkscape for vector files
- Freecad for a parametric CAD program
All of these can output/export a file type that can be used by Lightburn.
Needed a mount/holder for the flow meter on my laser. Designed it in Freecad, 3d printed the body and exported the top as an svg and cut the lid out of acrylic on the laser.
Good luck
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I used to use Inkscape for all my laser design work, but so rarely use it now that I’ve forgotten how most commands work. 99% of my stuff is done in Lightburn.
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Yeah Ash - I’m the same, used to use Coreldraw and Inkscape a lot, and Gimp occasionally; but now find LB great for 99% of what I do. Cheers.
It has been years since I’ve used it, but CorelDraw was about the most “intuitive” vector graphics program that I’ve done work with over the years, and their Graphics Suite combo package was a reasonable cost back in the day. The cost has gone up, and the older, less expensive, but still excellent for laser graphics versions do not play well with new operating systems (Windows 8 and higher). As an aside, back in the day, when I was working in an engraving shop, we worked exclusively in CorelDraw, since you could directly export the .CDR files to the laser and run the job. No such luxury now, when working with hobby laser machines.
Adobe Illustrator is probably the premier vector graphics program, but like all the Adobe programs, it is very expensive and the extra bells and whistles don’t add much for laser graphics.
Inkscape is free and will do about anything you need for laser graphics. The learning curve is a little steep, but not too bad if you concentrate on its capabilities that are applicable for laser artwork. Also, there are many, many tutorials available to help you understand the tools that are available.
For photos, Adobe Photoshop is the premier product, but it is very expensive.
Corel Photo Paint, part of the Corel Graphics Suite is also a capable product, but there is still a significant cost.
GIMP, a free photo application, is VERY capable, but has a very steep learning curve. If you can master it, GIMP will do nearly everything that Photoshop can do, but you will need to put in some time watching many different YouTube tutorials to get you there.
Finally LightBurn has the vector graphic tools needed for almost all laser projects. It now has some pretty good text manipulation tools, but if you demand even better tools for text, you’ll need to step up to a dedicated vector package such as Inkscape, CorelDraw, or Illustrator. These applications will allow more flexibility for text placement on a path, letter spacing, word spacing, and kerning. Lightburn also has reasonably good tools for converting bitmap images to forms suitable for the laser.
Thanks Jack… I am still new to all this. I have been trying to figure out various things as I come to them. I suppose I am not very graphic and rely more on downloading them from Vecteezy for now. I am just trying to manipulate them into something a little more of what I have in mind at times. Most all of what I am currently playing with are all vector files. I haven’t gotten into photographs quite yet. I really appreciate the advice and knowledge that everyone here has been giving me.
Dave, that about blew my mind. You definitely covered all the bases for me. Thanks so much.
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