Hi, I convert my pictures to greyscale in gimp and then import them into lightburn. No matter what settings I put into the program the preview is black. I took a chance and burnt a picture on my laser. The picture came out very well, but it is like printing blind if you cannot get a proper preview.
Please help.
Cheers, Gareth
In order to be able to preview the content of an image, you often have to zoom in a lot to see the details. It is connected to the fact that the preview shows where the laser “has been” and it is, just like the lines, black. (maybe not the best explanation but try to zoom in) 
As @bernd.dk suggests, zooming in while previewing will show all the details of what will be sent to the laser. The reason you see “all black” in the initial view, computer monitors can not display this much data at the size of the window, but the data is there and viewable when zoomed.
Thanks to both of you. I tried zooming in and as you both say it is possible to view the image properly. The only problem is that you can only look at a small portion of the project. It is a shame, because in every other respect it is a great program.
after you zoom in you can then scroll around just as you do in the work window.
True, but I still find it unsatisfactory. Maybe Lightburn could fix this?
Unfortunately sometimes you just have to accept the compromise, the other option my be waiting 15min for the recalculations being done to get what user wants.
The issue here is screen real estate, number of available pixels and the amount of data used to produce the output sent to the laser. We show exactly what will be sent to the laser in its entirety, which represents a significant amount of data. The preview window presents a compromise, showing the entire output view and a zoom feature to allow review of the greater details.
That said, we are always open for suggestions and provide a Feature Suggestions site for just that. 
I am far from an expert in graphics programs, but to me the word preview suggests that you will be presented with a picture of what your finished project will look like. My preview was a black and white mess, but the picture I burnt was excellent. Playing around with the program I found that by reducing the size of the project by 75% and then previewing it, I got far better preview image.
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