LightBurn 101: Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

when I first started using light burn I got stuck a lot so now that I've done a few dozen projects and I've also consumed hours and hours of online tutorials and information about the software I thought I'd come back and create The Beginner's tutorial to light burn that I wish I had when I first got started so today I'm going to show you all of the basics that you need to know in order to complete your first two projects inside of a fresh install of light burn in fact by the end of this video I'm going to show you exactly how to create a custom name gift tag like this one and this adorable little hot air balloon design and I'm going to do it in this way because I think working through real examples like this is really the best way to start to understand this type of software because we're going to be using the tools and features of light burn in context each of these projects will also demonstrate different tools inside of light burn that you're going to want to know for a lot of your projects that you're working on yourself so with that in mind here are the four main things that we're going to cover in today's video first I'm going to take you through an orientation of the navigation tools inside of lightburn because this is where people typically get frustrated at the beginning because some of the tool schools aren't particularly intuitive but if you know how they work it becomes much simpler second I'm going to take you step by step through exactly how to design a new project from scratch and light burn using this little name gift tag as an example we're going to start from a blank screen and create this gift tag in light burn and third because I know a lot of people want to know how to bring external images into light burn and then to use them with the software we're going to make this air balloon design by taking some images importing them into light burn and then using the trace feature in light burn in order to make this into a file that we can actually burn on our lasers fourth we're going to go through three different methods of how to frame or align your material on the work bed and I'm going to show you these different methods because depending on what your project is one of them might work better than the other but I wanted to give you several different options to make sure that you're going to be able to do this successfully the first time then we're actually going to burn out both of these projects and at the end of the video we'll take a closer look at the final results to see how everything turned out so with that said let's get right into the first top topic first up is navigation as you can see I've already opened lightburn here on my computer and I am going to assume that you've already installed it on your machine and that you've already run these setup for your specific laser if you haven't done those steps yet that's okay I'm going to leave a link in the description that's going to cover that process so with that said let's get into the navigation tools the first thing you'll probably notice is this design space here in the Middle With The Grid on it and you're also going to see your little pointer clicker that I'm moving around here this is the default and this allows you to click on objects once you've created them and manipulate them we don't have that yet and one of the first things that you'll probably be frustrated by is if you try to click and drag it's just going to do an outline it's not going to move you around and so if you want to move around the grid you have to hold space bar and then you can click and drag if you want to zoom in you can use these buttons up here which will Zoom you in and out or I'm using a mouse that has a scroll wheel so I like to just use that scroll wheel to zoom in and out that's pretty convenient and so those are the first couple things you're going to need to know and the next thing you're going to notice is this left hand toolbar over here this has a lot of things that you're going to use to create designs such as shapes text Etc so let's just start by selecting this little square box here so we can create a square now what you're probably going to want to do next is be able to manipulate the square but if you just have these Square things still selected which is how it will be by default if you try to click on this what you'll end up doing is just creating more and more squares which is pretty frustrating and so what you have to actually do in order to manipulate the square that you've created is go back to the pointer tool here and that will allow you to rotate it like this or to select the sides and expand it and there's a lot of other things that you can do with this if you have a tool selected like the square tool again so I'm going to create another Square here and you don't take the time to go and and select this pointer pointer tool you can save yourself some time by just simply hitting the Escape key on your keyboard twice and that will take you back to the default which is the pointer key and so that will allow you to do the these manipulations again another place I should mention that the Escape key will save you is sometimes people have a problem where they're using this drawing tool maybe they're trying to create some extended or interesting shape but then they get stuck here and they just can't get out of this clicking situation and you can solve that again by just hitting the Escape key one hit of the Escape key will take you back to the pointer and if you hit it again it will take you back to the pointer tool and then you can manipulate this monstrosity you've created however you like now there are a lot of other tools here that we haven't covered in light burn yet but we're actually going to jump straight into a project because we're going to hit a bunch of those other tools that you'll need to know as we're doing our sample design projects and I think that will help you understand them a lot better by actually using them in the context of a real project so let's get right into that so now we're going to design this little gift tag that I showed at the beginning of the video and the first thing we need to do is actually just select our text tool so over here on the left hand side of light burn we have this little a shape letter just click on that and that will give you the textbook tool and then you can just click anywhere on the grid to get your cursor and so then I'm just going to type in Natalie so that'll be our name for this gift tag and then there's a couple of other things that we'll want to adjust here so first of all you want this to be a particular height right you don't want it to be like random or set by default and for this type of tag I like to use something around one inch and so in light burn you can adjust that by just going over here and I have it set to to inches here and I have just one and so I'm going to keep that setting but if yours is something else which it probably will be you can adjust that right here and then you can also change the font so there's a ton of different fonts here that you can use at for a name like this on a gift tag I think this one is is pretty good I don't know how to pronounce that it's something like coconor I'm guessing and so I'm just going to set it there and we're going to call that good for the font so the next thing we need to do is create some sort of outline around this right because we also want to be able to cut it out and if we just have this we just have the engraved part for the letters and so to get that outline there is a very handy tool that we can use called offset and it's this little o over here on the left hand side of light burn so I'm just going to go ahead and click that and what it does is it just creates a line outline organically around your shape and so you can change the offset distance to make it bigger or smaller I'm just going to make this simple and go for a 0.2 which looks about right to me so let's go with that the next thing we're going to need to add is something for this little eyelet hole here so that we can put some thread or string or something through there so let's make that next so we're going to need to use our Circle tool over here on the left hand side of light burn and I'm just going to make myself a nice little circle like this that looks about right and for this one I'm going to go back to my selector and rotate it a little bit so I can have it offset and sort of uh aligned with the name in a way and then I'm just going to kind of overlap it like this on the edge where I want that hole to be so now we have two different shapes here right but we want them to be combined and there's another handy light burn tool that you can use to do that called the weld tool in order to do that we have to select both of the shapes that we want to be combined and so I'm just going to hold my uh my uh Mac button it's the like command button on on Windows I believe it's the control button and so I'm going to select both of these and then once you've done that then you're going to select this button here which is weld all selected together and then boom both of these individual shapes are now one shape which is pretty cool and then we have our space in order to add that little eyelet key so now there's one more thing missing in our shape and that is an additional hole inside of this new shape that we added in order to create the cut for the string to feed through so now we're going to need our Circle tool here again and next I I want actually this one to be a perfect circle instead of a a like cylinder or whatever or an oval that's the word I'm looking for and so in order to do that you can always create a perfect version of the shape you've selected by holding the shift key so I've got the circle selected I'm going to hold shift on my keyboard and that's going to give me a perfect circle okay so I've got my perfect circle here I'm going to hit Escape so that I can select this and then I'm going to move it over here now just like with the name we want this circle to be a particular size size right and so I'm going to show you how to set that size now so to know what size you want for this hole you kind of need to know the size of whatever you want to feed through it so now with this type of gift tag my wife and I have actually made these for our Etsy store as like a nice little add-on for the packaging for a custom product that we've made for somebody and so from the type of twine that we use I know that the hole is usually not going to need to be any larger than .18 inches and so if I know that I can just select my circle here and then go up here to the width and height and the top of light burn here and I can just change this to 0.18 and that's going to adjust the size of my circle okay so I know this is going to work well for the twine that I'm using for this project and what you might have noticed here is when I adjusted the width of my circle it automatically adjusted the height and that's because this little lock key is on and if I was to undo this it would unlock the aspect ratio and that Circle would be able to change only in one dimension so let me just show you that real quickly because this is useful in some situations so I I went back to the original size of the circle now I'm going to change just the width to 0.8 now you can see it turns into an oval now I don't want that I just wanted to show you that you can do that if you need to for your design so I'm going to re-lock this aspect ratio and do 0.18 and then I'm going to have the circle of the appropriate size and I'm just going to move it a little bit until it looks right for my design and then we're going to have it so there we go now that we've finished designing our basic shape here we need to work on setting the layers okay because we're going to do some engraving and cutting here so we're going to need at least two layers for a project like this and so I'm going to try to do this the simplest way possible and I'm just going to start by selecting everything that I want to be engraved okay and so in that situation we're just going to want our name piece so I've selected our name piece here and what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go down here to these colorful boxes on the bottom okay and I'm just going to click this zero one blue box okay and what it does here is it's just going to change the color of that and it's going to add a new layer over here on this right hand box called Cuts in layers if you do not have this cuts and layers box showing then you can easily display it by just right clicking on whatever you do have here displaying Cuts in layers by just checking that box if it's not checked and then if it's down here if it's still not showing you can come down here and just click whichever one says cuts and layers like I have here so just in case you didn't have that visible that's how you make it visible so I've selected everything for engrave and I've set it to Blue so that's the first step and then I'm going to select everything that I want to cut so that'll be the outline and my circle so I've selected all of that and I'm going to click this little red box here with the the number two on it okay so now I have a blue and I have a red and so I've separated my engraved and my cut into two layers and now I need to actually set the power and speed settings is appropriate for those things but before we do those settings I wanted to quickly mention a little tip here so these little boxes at the bottom 0 0 through 29 it doesn't really matter which of these you choose for your layers but as a best practice it can be helpful to do some basic color coding here so you may notice that I used a blue for my engraved and then red for my cut so if I were to expand this design to make it more complex with multiple layers on top of this then it could be helpful for me to use more reddish tone colors as my other cuts and more bluish tone colors for my layers of additional engraves and so that's just a helpful little system that you can use when you get into doing larger amounts of layers it's not a perfect system but I think it is helpful so just a little note there if you're an observant person then you may have also noticed these little names here that are assigned to each a layer and you may have also noticed that even though we're using blue as an engrave it has a name that is small cut now that's actually not going to determine anything to do with with our speed and power settings so it won't actually affect the job but for organizational purposes if you'd rather that say something else all you have to do is come over here to the layer section and double click on that layer and it opens up a whole pane of other settings and we won't go through all of these here that could be a topic for another day but what you can do if you want to change these names for organization you can just come right here change that name and you're good to go now back to our power in speed settings now in order to do this perfectly for your design here what you're actually going to need to do is to run a test file like one of these so this is the engraved test file and the cut test file and the reason that this is important and why you may have seen some of these online is because the actual power and speed you need will depend on the specific material you're using and on the specific laser you're using and so in order to get these dialed just right then it does help a lot to run this type of test card the good news is if you don't have one already you don't need to buy one or make one yourself I have these all ready and you can get them for free so just go down to the description below and you can get both of these test files on my website for free and so go get that there and then that will allow you to go to the next step because what you're going to do is run these tests look at the results see the cleanest cut that you like with the material you're going to make your name tag out of and then similarly look at the engraved card and find the box that represents the best speed and power for the level and the Darkness of the engraved that you like best for your design and then you're going to use those to input into the layers like I'm going to show you to do for this gift tag right now so I've already run test cards and I've actually made a few of these tags already and so I'm just going to go ahead and now fill in the settings that I know will work well for my material and my laser and so first what I'm going to do is for my engrave layer I'm going to set from line to fill because for an engrave I need it to actually fill in this situation and that basically just means all of my shapes are going to be filled that's the name in with uh engraved dark color and so I'm going to select that fill and then I'm going to select this layer the blue layer and I'm going to go down here and just manipulate these settings here in the pane on the right hand side and for this one I know that my speed is going to need to be eleven thousand millimeters per minute and I know my laser needs to be set to a power of 70 and this is just going to be your one pass so I'm going to make the pass count one and then the interval so this one is is interesting and it's a little bit complicated to understand if you really want to go deep down the rabbit hole but as I understand it basically in those situations you're going to want this to be set to roughly the dot size of your laser and I'm running an xtool D1 Pro 20 watt module here for this project and so I am going to put in .08 which is roughly the size of the the dot on that laser module okay that pretty much does it for the engraved so now we're going to do the cut layer so I'm going to click on the red layer here and I'm going to enter in my settings now for this one we need it to be line not fill because it's cutting a line thus the name so it's a line and what I'm going to do here is put in 650 millimeters per minute which is my cut setting and then my max power will be 80 and then I'm going to do two passes so this tends to be the best for this type of project in my situation here and then we are pretty much it that's basically all we need to do for the layers for now and so what we're going to do next is we're actually going to move on to our second project I'm going to show you how to do that one and then I'm going to show you how to do the framing or alignment with your laser and also then the the cut of both of these projects at the same time so let's go ahead and make our second project here right now now we're going to do a slightly more advanced project and that is this little hot air balloon but don't worry it's still relatively simple and it will illustrate some additional tools that we haven't used yet in this video and so this little hot air balloon was actually designed by my wife on an app called procreate on her iPad now one of the things about this app is that it does not allow you to export what are called Vector files and a vector file is basically anything that you create directly within lightburn is a vector file but a lot of other things like if you take a picture on your phone that's a JPEG and so there's a bunch of different file formats and so if I have a design that looks something like this in order to get it to work in light burn I can export it as an image like a JPEG and then actually use a tool called the trace tool in light burn to transform that jpeg into a vector file which we can then use with our laser and so that's where it all kind of comes together and so that's what we're going to do right now for this hot air balloon project so the first thing we need to do is import our image and there's two main ways of doing that first you can use this button up here in the top left corner to go through your computer's file system to find the image and import it that way but personally I like to use the other method which is just simply to open up the picture and then click and drag into your workspace like so once you have it in your workspace I'm just going to shrink it down a little bit and then I'm going to right click on that image and go down to the trace image button and click on that then it's going to open up a new window for Trace image and when you have a very simple design like this simplified version of our hot air balloon then it's going to do a pretty good job of creating a pink outline all the way around your shape if it doesn't do a good job on the first time you can play with these settings like the threshold to adjust this to try to get the pink to go exactly where you want it to go and there's also this setting here that allows you to ignore less than and that's basically if you have some stray little pink dots or pixels that's just because the the software didn't know exactly where the lines were supposed to be and it might have some scattered pink dots and you can adjust that just by putting in a higher number here like 50 or something like that so there are other settings here we're not going to go in depth into all of them but suffice to say that you can adjust things and manipulate things until your outline looks just right since it's so simple we're just going to go with the default here and click OK once we do that we're going to get an outline it's basically taken our jpeg image that we imported and converted it into this Vector outline and this is great because then we can go ahead and use this like a design that we created ourselves directly in lightburn we have it assigned to this this layer and we can just put in our settings and set this up right away for a cut and that would be awesome and so that's kind of the first part of this process but let's make things a little bit more advanced and so the next thing that we you can do is actually bring in another layer with another image and I'll show you how I can lay that over the top of this to make a like multi-layer design with multiple images so let's do that now okay so now I'm bringing in my second image which is going to be our engrave layer and right off the bat one thing that you might wonder is well why wouldn't you just import your total image of the hot air balloon all at once so if you have your your drawing or your sketch or whatever just import it all at once and the answer is you can do that and we have actually done that but what you have to do sometimes is create multiple traces to get the outline and then the engraved Parts all done just right and so sometimes it's actually simpler to separate some parts of your design in the images before importing them into light burn just to make the trace function easier and so that's one reason you might do this here but also I'm going to demonstrate some things here with the alignment tools that I think are useful regardless of whether you're doing an image Trace like this or if you're just designing something from scratch and light burn so I'm kind of showing this for all of those reasons so you can see these tools and so that's just a little bit of context that said let's get right into it so I'm going to right click here just like I did with my new image and I'm going to click Trace again and as you can see here there is a little stray pixel I kind of alluded to this in the last bit there and to get rid of that I'm just going to come over here and enter higher numbers let's try 20 and yep that got rid of that little pixel and it looks like otherwise our lines are relatively clean so I'm just going to go with this and hit OK so now I have two different designs here I have the original outline and I have my in Gray and now I need to do a couple of other things to get these combined and aligned perfectly so the first thing we need to do here is actually to resize the shapes themselves because they just came in with the defaults from the trace function so I'm just going to start with the first layer that we traced in and I know that I want this to be about five and a half inches tall when I'm done so I'm just going to enter in a height of 5.5 now I want this other shape the second layer that we traced in to be the same size but it doesn't really have the basket down here so it won't actually be the same height as the first shape but they will be the same width and so I'm just going to click that first shape we resize and look at what the width is okay we can see here the width is 3.7442 so I'm going to select our second shape and just enter in 3.7442 and because the aspect ratio is locked this should also give us the appropriate height for what we want to do so now we're going to get into some of the alignment features that are really helpful for putting shapes or layers like this together so for the alignment I just need to First select both of these shapes and then I'm going to do a align vcenter so I just click this button and then I'm going to vcenter and that's going to vertically align these two shapes and then I want to top align them so I'm going to click this button and then go to align top and now our shapes are all perfectly combined without us having to finagle and try to kind of guess how things go together which can really really help when you're doing this sort of a job where you have multiple layers for one design and since we have a cut and engraved part of this project I now actually need to separate these two layers so that we can enter the appropriate settings and so I'm just going to select the internal layer here for the engrave and put it onto a separate blue layer and that leads one last job which is entering the speed and power settings for both of these layers this is a different material than we used for the the keychain or the gift tag I should say and so I'm just going to quickly fill these in and you can kind of watch as I'm doing it so for the cut we need to put in for this one 425 because it's thicker material here and I like to do 80 power and two passes and then this is line so that's correct and then I'm going to go to the blue layer now this is selected for the fill so that is correct and then I want to do 11k by 60 this time and it looks like our interval is already correct so that should be good so those are our settings now we'll move on to the next step and another thing you might want to do with your light burn design here is actually to run a preview so you can do that with everything selected here by just clicking this little TV screen looking icon at the top and that's going to give you a preview and this shows you a lot of useful information that you can use as a check before you actually run your project including how long it's estimating it will take to complete and also some other information about how it's going to go about the laser path so you can kind of see the whole projected path of the burn and so this is useful to use before running your final job so that's there okay now that we've finished the lightburn files for our two projects the next thing we need to do is framing or alignment and there are a bunch of different ways to do this but I'm going to show you the three methods that I think are the easiest and then once we've got that set for both of these files we're actually going to run these projects and burn them out so that we can see the final result so let's get started with the framing and Alignment so before before we can get into the Real Alignment steps here we have to do a couple of setup steps to make sure we're ready to do it correctly and so the first thing we need to do is to focus our laser to make sure it's at the appropriate height or z-axis height and so we're going to do that now different lasers do this process differently but for my x dual D1 Pro here I have a little kickstand I put that down rested on the material tighten my module into place and then put the kickstand away now I know different diode lasers sometimes have a tool that allows you to do this and other larger lasers like for example bigger CO2 lasers will sometimes have other mechanisms or even automatic tools that do this for you but in any case if you need to focus your laser then we need to do that now once the laser is focused we also need to make sure that it is in the appropriate home position so a lot of lasers that have homing switches or larger more sophisticated devices will kind of do this for you automatically so some of you won't have to worry about this but if you have a diode laser or if you have a laser that that does not have homing switches then you need to make sure that before you turn the laser on the laser head module is in the appropriate location now my X tool D1 Pro does have homing switches but I've actually turned them off for reasons that I talk about in another video and so I'm going to manually home my laser by just putting it in the top left corner of the laser which is the default homing location for a lot of lasers now I'm going to start by showing you the I guess quick and dirty method which is the first method that I learned to use for framing a laser in place and that is by just creating a square so I'm selecting a square here in light burn and I'm just going to make it around my shape so I'm just going to kind of align it and make sure it fits around my shape without bumping up against it and then I'm going to put this on its own layer so I'll use this little gray layer here and I'll go to my cuts and layers and what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to just set the this to fire the laser on an extremely low setting and so I'm gonna do a relatively high speed for this so we'll say 4 000 millimeters per minute and then I've learned that with my 20 watt laser the lowest power that I found that I can use while still being able to see the laser dot on the material in order to make sure that it's framing correctly is actually 0.3 so very very low power percentage which is a good thing for this purpose and then for the pass count here what I'm going to do is put in two or maybe three passes so that I actually have time to position my material which is especially helpful if you're doing something that needs to be framed perfectly so for example you might be able to see here I have these like plaques that I've made where the material is already set and then I want to frame it you could do that with absolute coordinates by making a template which is something we'll talk about later but you could also do this by doing like a little frame and just trying to shift things around until the laser perfectly frames the outline which is actually how I made that one and so this is one method there are a lot of methods like I mentioned and so once we have this these settings in I have my 4000 low power and I'm doing two passes I'm going to make this the top layer so I'm going to reposition this to up here and then I'm going to turn off the output importantly of my real layers so both my cut and my engraved layers here I'm going to turn off the output and what this is going to do is if I run this job if I like Press Start and run this job it's going to only run this layer because it's the only one with the output switch on and that's important because then it's only going to run my little engrave line path so this is basically a layer which has the sole purpose of showing me where the laser job is going to be and so I'm going to go ahead and run this now for our little our little project to show you how this can be done with this method I've just put my safety glasses on and turned my laser on and you may want to put on some safety glasses before you turn on your laser as well so just a reminder about that and then what we need to do here is because I have already homed my laser like we talked about earlier I need to now move it into position of this little Green Dot because for this job my job origin is this Green Dot because I'm just so happen to have set it to the top right corner here in this job origin section and I'm going to be running this as a current position project which you may or may not have heard of but suffice to say I need it to be at that Green Dot in order for this to work so in order to move my laser there I can use this little map tool here by clicking on that and then just simply clicking on my green square sometimes you have to click it twice to get this to work but once you get it there then we're in good shape and we can move on to the next step now I'm just going to move my wood material here such that the top right hand corner is right about where my laser head module is because we are using that job origin and then from there we can go ahead and frame our project when we start the frame basically what we do is just come back into light burn we make sure our settings are how we want them with just the laser framing layer on for the output and the other two off and then you can just click Start and once you click Start you can see the laser head module is just going to go ahead and Trace that rectangle we've created and it's going to do two pass passes just like we specified now that our material and Laser head are in position we can come back into light burn and we can just turn off our framing layer and then turn on the output for the other two layers we have here once that's ready I can go ahead and just click Start and here's what the laser looks like running at the beginning here we'll check back in on the finished product at the end of the video but first let's finish our second project okay now I've opened our other little project here the gift tag and I'm going to show you how to use the second framing method and this is honestly probably the one that I personally use the most now and it just kind of is because of the types of projects I'm doing and so you may have noticed in light burn here these little frame buttons there's the square one and then there's the circle one here on the right hand side and if you've seen those you may have wondered like how do I use them what do they do or maybe you've tried to use them and they've been a little bit different than you expected and so running the type of laser that I'm running before we use these we actually need to do some settings in the device settings for the specific laser we have so I have the X tool D1 Pro that I'm running running as I've mentioned and for this I need to go to file and actually go to edit and then go down to device settings and then this is going to open the settings specific to my laser so you can see here it's for the xtool D1 Pro specifically and so if you have multiple lasers you may have to do this multiple times to get it to work for everything you're running and so you'll notice here there are some other options set here and um what you can do here is there's a setting called enable laser fire button and it has a warning here that you should pay attention to because it's warning you that this can be very dangerous for CO2 lasers as I mentioned I'm doing this all on a diode laser and so that's why I'm able to use these settings and so pay attention to this if you have a CO2 laser Safety First and all that jazz but for my purposes here and the way that I'm doing this I'm going to turn this enable laser fire button on and also the laser on when framing button and that's how I'm going to use this next bit okay and then I'm going to push ok and then the next thing that we need to do settings wise is there is a move Tab and so I'm going to go to that I have it here if you don't see this or you don't have it in your options you can just right click make sure move is selected if it's not check the box it'll pop up here and then you can click on it okay and so here in the move box is actually for for my type of diode laser it's where we're going to have our settings for the the frame button and so this power here is the power that will be used in the framing job that is activated by these buttons here in the laser pane okay and so I have this set 2.3 and as you may remember from our first framing example I use 0.3 as my power for my outline framing layer and so I'm using the same power here and so once I've done that I also need to set some other settings here I put in 4 000 millimeters per minute for the speed and I put in one inch for the distance and so these are basically going to determine how fast your laser moves when you use the like move buttons and the move settings and the distance is basically how far it's going to move if you click the button like one time um so that's that's basically how it works in essence and the important thing is that we need these settings to be done in order to use these frame things so now I'm going to focus my laser since this is a different material with a different thickness and then I'm going to home my laser and then I'm going to go ahead and put my safety glasses on and turn on my laser now that my laser is on I again need to put the position of the laser head to this little green square so I'm going to use this tool again now that my laser head and material are in position I can go ahead and click this Frame button I have a choice between two frame buttons I can use this square one or I can use the circle one or the rubber band boundary personally I like to use the rubber band One usually especially for something like like this because oftentimes I'm going to be cutting something like this out of scrap wood and that allows me to make sure my design is not hitting into any of the existing holes in that piece of wood and so I'm going to go ahead and click that and here's what the frame looks like with the laser running as you can see this method of framing is pretty similar to the first one it's just a little bit different in how you go about it and which buttons you push and how you use the settings so now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start this project because our material is lined up with the laser appropriately and as you can see our laser is getting going and I had one more trick that I wanted to show you here for framing and this is particularly useful for those of you who are trying to align and Center a design on top of an object so for example if you're trying to do an engraving on a coaster this is a method that you could use to make that alignment easier and so the way we're going to do this is actually using absolute coordinates and so I'm going to just change on the right hand side here from current position to Absolute coordinates and you'll notice that the green box that we've been using now jumps over to the left hand corner corner and another thing you might notice about my work area here in lightburn is that I have a very long work area and that's because I have the extension kit on my xtool D1 Pro and so if you are seeing something here that you think is maybe not perfectly aligned with the laser you actually have then you can edit it by going back to device settings in the edit menu and you can adjust the working size here usually this will be correct when you run the initial setup of your laser but if you have any issues with it this is where you can make adjustments and so with that said what we're basically going to do here is I'm just going to get a little piece of cardboard and I'm going to create a template for our design and I'm going to put this into my laser and we're basically just going to engrave an outline of the object to help us place it there and this is really handy and it is actually a trick I learned from Louisiana hobby guy who's here on YouTube and probably knows more about light burn than anybody else on YouTube if you haven't seen his channel yet but at any rate this uh let's let's go through this example as if we were doing a coaster let's say for example we're doing these slate coasters here on Amazon and you can see here that the diameter of these coasters is four inches and so let's go ahead and make ourselves a little template for one of these so I've got the circle tool here in light burn and I'm going to make this one A Perfect Circle so I'm holding the shift key and then let's say these are four inches in diameter but let's say just to give ourselves a little extra wiggle room to make this a bit easier I'm gonna do just 4.1 inches as an example so now I have my circle here and what I'm going to do next is I'm just going to align it in my space to whoops align it into my space to where I want it to be on the workbed itself and so I'm just going to give it an X position of 11 which is kind of middle-ish of my work bed and then I'm just going to put it way at the top let's just say 0.1 in the Y coordinates so I'm putting it roughly middle at the top of my work area just to make this easier to do and so now what we're going to do is I'm going to just quickly adjust the the engraved settings here I've actually already put them in and these are ones that I just know from my own past experience that I can do an engrave on cardboard with my laser with a 300 millimeter per minute speed and a power of 15 and so I've got my settings in here already and so the next thing I need to do is go position my piece of cardboard over on the laser bed so let me jump over there now so as you can see I'm just putting this piece of cardboard pretty much at the top of my work bed roughly where it shows on the light burn where where my project is going to be and you may also notice that my piece of cardboard is pretty nice and flat and that's helpful here but if you had sort of somewhat warped or bendy cardboard you can weight it down with some little magnets like this and that is is helpful and so now that I've got this lined up we also need to make sure that the laser is focused of course because this is a different material size so make sure your laser is focused if you need to do that like I do here and then we can move on to the next step now I've got my safety glasses back on and I've got my laser on and so now I'm just going to go ahead and frame this job as you can see this looks like it's pretty well aligned and so I'm just going to go ahead and start my project now that we have our outline we are going to want to actually move the laser head a little bit so that we'll have space to put whatever we want like our coaster over into our template area and so without moving the cardboard at all I'm just going to use this location tool here to just move the laser over here now that the laser is out of the way we can position our coaster or whatever we have to go here I don't actually have one of these slate coasters so I'm just kind of showing this as an example now back into light burn here I want to just show you how you could position your design on the light burn space in order to work together with the template that we've positioned on the workben and so now I'm just going to create a real simple sample design here I'm going to get my text cool tool and I'm just going to do a wow explanation mark and then I'm going to take this and I'm going to select that and my circle so that I can do the alignment tools that we talked about earlier so I'm going to align Center and then I'm going to align H Center so that's centered right in the middle of the circle now but we don't want the the new wow that I just created to at the same time re-engrave our Circle so I'm just going to move the the circle part to a new layer and I'm going to turn off the output on that layer such that my wow is the only thing that we're going to be engraving and so now that we have this set up even though we've moved our laser over to the side if I go ahead and start this job then it will engrave right in the center of that template we've created so I'll go ahead and start this now here you can see our final product and as you can see the wow is dead center in the middle of this circle I should mention that we kind of skipped a step because I don't actually have a slate coaster to show this with I didn't refocus the the laser head again to fit another material because we're just doing it again on the cardboard but of course if you had another material you would probably have to adjust the height of the laser head module but we're not doing this here for the reasons I mentioned but the real beauty of this approach is if you had to do a ton of coasters say you had to do like 20 coasters one after the other even if you had a small laser you could make yourself a little template like this and put coasters on them run it with absolute coordinates take them all off and then put a new batch on run it again and you could keep doing this and it allows you cut to kind of batch process your laser engraving if you want to do that now here we are with our finished project so let's just take a closer look at them and see how they really turned out first of all the hot air balloon I think this one actually turned out really well it just has a little bit of laser scorching around the Rope area but we can clean that up really easily with just a bit of sandpaper none the Natalie gift tag here also needs a little bit of sandpaper around a couple of the edges but otherwise the face turned out pretty well but if we flip this over on the back we'll see there's actually some chipping here and some of the edges of the design didn't cut out quite perfectly and that's because when I ran this project it didn't fully cut out of the wood and I actually had to finish up some of it with an X-Acto blade and that's just part of this process you'll see that things don't always turn out exactly like you expected and you have to make adjustments and you learn you improve your process and that's how it goes but I really do hope that you found this video helpful and if you have any corrections or additions that you'd like to add or let me know about I'm learning this as I go to so feel free to leave those in the comments section below and as a reminder if you want to get my test file to use for your own material tests you can get that at my website for free at the link in the description below and finally a like And subscribe to the channel would be amazing if you found this useful so until next time I'll see you

Channel: Asher DIY

Views: 16,254

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Id: Gcx3NrNRcfw

Length: 42min 8sec (2528 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023