Solved - Tracing round tools

Hi, Very new to Laser cutting engraving but one of my use cases is to cut foam inlays for things like Peli cases and tools etc.
I took a photo (from phone) of a simple pair of pliers imported the photo (LPG) then used the trace tool but after playing with the settings still did not get anything great. I started to trace round with a line but because the line is black and so is the picture i could not do this very well. Is there a trick to this?

Thanks in advance

The object you wish to make a foam insert for:

  • place it on a black or white background (paper for example). You want to use a contrasting color of the target object for best trace results.
  • take an overhead photo of the object straight on / pointing down (I use my LightBurn Camera often to do this). If you use a phone, try to leverage the crosshair tilt indication to be sure you’re lined up.
  • measure a dimension of the object (for scaling).
  • import the photo into LightBurn
  • trace photo
  • use shape tool to make a scale reference of the dimension
  • drag the corner of the traced image to scale x/y proportionally until the dimension fits into scaled reference shape.
1 Like

The line has whatever color you select, black is just the default. You can select the layer (and with that the color) with the selector at the bottom of the screen.

Also, if you set the layer with the image to not output, it will be shown faded.

One more ip for manual tracing: Trace rather roughly, especially in curvy areas. When you’re done, use the “Edit Nodes” tool to drag the straight lines into nice round shapes. Also, switch off “snap to grid” in the settings while tracing.

Thank you Henry. That is just what i needed.

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