My passthrough dilemma

My Passthrough dilemma. I have read all over the place about passthrough on or off. So I have done a lot of pre-processing in GIMP and now I want to burn a tile. Sooooo, correct me if I am wrong, but if I turn ON passthrough, LightBurn will (discounting speed, power settings etc) burn my file without any further processing. Just the way I made it in GIMP… If I turn OFF passthrough, LightBurn will do some of its own processing such as dithering. So why does my burn time double when I turn ON passthrough though LightBurn has less work to do??? Or does it?

Are you asking if the time is doubled? Or is this a statement that it does double to time to process this job? This is not clear.

If part of your image preprocessing includes dithering, of any style, you must turn ‘Pass-Through’ ON (green). This means LightBurn will pass your image through LightBurn and not do any further image processing. Turning this on tells LightBurn to not touch your image and use the image as you have presented.

If I tell it to “preview”, it shows the burn time has doubled. An yes, I did dithering in GIMP

What DPI did you set in GIMP, and what size? What DPI and size have you set when passthrough is off? If those aren’t the same, that’s the reason. Passthrough on means LightBurn sends each pixel, untouched, to the laser.

If you dithered at 500 DPI and set pass-through on, LightBurn sends every dot in the original image to the machine. If you set LightBurn to 254 DPI normally, then turning off pass-through means LightBurn can resize the image to the correct output size and DPI, and sends at 254 DPI, not the DPI of the source image.

Why dither in Gimp when you can just do that in LightBurn? With pass-through disabled you have much greater flexibility.

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