Masking text/shapes from a traced image

I’m struggling trying to find a way to mask out where text would overlap with a background and both engrave the same area.

Making some clock faces (non functional clocks) for an idea my wife had for in our home to hang clocks showing times of big events (her/my birth, kids birth, wedding, etc). Wedding clock I thought I’d do the whole ‘stars on the exact moment you got married’ thing. Imported image, traced it, looks great. The thing is I’d like to mask the stars so they don’t engrave where they overlap with the text, and the clock hands, and numbers, and anything else. I’m trying to avoid it burning too deep and make the other details really stand out over the top of the stars. I did a test burn and I’m just not a huge fan of the overlap- especially since I’m going to try to fill the engravings with powder coating pigment. I don’t want the laser running over the same paint multiple times and risking burning it away. Is there a way to easily mask them out of the star layer entirely so the stars don’t ever burn in the overlaps?

I want to be able to set up the layers so that I can do my initial engraving on a round board that’s fixed in place, then do the color fill without having that laser run back over undesirable areas so that the colors don’t overlap or get burned away by multiple unnecessary laser passes.

Diode laser- Longer ray5, 20 watt. I’ve tried converting the background to bitmap image and can’t get the existing mask option to become available. I’ve tried Boolean add/subtract/&c. Besides exporting everything to Photoshop and doing the editing there and then importing it all back into lightburn, I can’t see a way to do it in this program. I really don’t want to renew my adobe subscription.

One of these should get you where you need to be.

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As soon as I finish this computer based training at work… I’ll pop an earbud in and check out both of those. Thanks