I am working on layered paper art which I design in Adobe Illustrator. I’d like to import my .ai file with the layers in the same order as the original file, and occasionally I will have several layers that are the same color in Illustrator.
When I import my .ai file to Lightburn it sorts them by color in the order that the colors appear on the bottom of the workspace. Also any layers that have the same color in Illustrator will be combined into a single layer in Lightburn. Is there a way to instead keep the original layer order?
Hi @OccidentalTradingCo
LightBurn works a bit differently to Illustrator — instead of keeping Illustrator’s layer stacks, it sorts everything into LightBurn layers by colour. That means if two Illustrator layers use the same colour, they’ll be merged, and the order will follow the fixed palette along the bottom of the screen.
If you want to keep them separate, each layer in Illustrator needs to use a unique colour that maps to a LightBurn layer. Just keep in mind LightBurn is limited to the 29 colours on its palette, so that’s the maximum number of layers you can preserve on import.
More technically: Illustrator stores a hierarchy of layers and sub-layers, but LightBurn doesn’t import that hierarchy. It flattens objects into up to 29 colour coded layers, and those always display in the bottom palette order. That’s why the original stacking order can’t be preserved.
We have more information on the colour palette here: