Newbie needs help - Please

Community Laser Talk
1

Hi all. I’m new to lightburn and engraving.
What I’ve done is to paint some tiles and then burn out the the required design.
What I’d like to do now is reverse this, so how can I burn the paint away but leave my design paint behind.
This is probably really simple but I’m struggling.

Thanks

Thank you

2

Are you dealing with raster or vector design?

If raster, you can negate the image so that the areas to engrave are reversed.

For vector, shapes become reversed when stacked on top of another shape. So put a background shape behind all the shapes you want reversed.

3

I’ve no idea what a raster or vector is.
I’ve got a transparent png file that I want my laser to not burn out. Everything else in a 100 x 100mm area needs to go.

4

This is a raster. A raster image is one made of pixels. In contract, a vector design is one described in terms of mathematical formulas and stays smooth irrespective of zoom level.

You can invert the image by enabling “negative image” in the cut setting:

image
image732×828 45.1 KB

5

Sorry it’s still not working how I want it to.
The blue layer is what I want to burn off me the owl is what I want to leave alone.
The preview still shows both will be burned out.

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image1920×1440 359 KB

image
image1920×2560 968 KB

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image1920×2560 325 KB

6

Well, with that approach you’re basically burning a full black box and then a full owl on top of another.

If you’re trying to burn the transparent part of the image you’ve got two options:

  1. process the image in an external tool to convert background to white. Or you could do all the processing and invert the image in the external tool
  2. trace the owl in LightBurn to convert from raster to vector. Then put the traced owl on the same blue 01 layer which will invert it and not burn
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7

Sounds like option 2 is the way to go.
Thank you for you help and patience.

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