10 LightBurn Tips That Will Save You Hours

LightBurn is the most flexible piece of software in any laser shop — and the most punishing if you don’t know where the good defaults live. These ten tips are the ones we’d hand a friend who just bought a diode or CO₂ machine and wants to skip the first month of bad burns.

1. Pick the right image mode before anything else

The Image dropdown in LightBurn (Threshold, Ordered, Atkinson, Jarvis, Stucki, Newsprint, Passthrough, Grayscale) decides 80% of how your engrave will look. The rest is power and speed.

• Jarvis — best all-rounder for photos on wood, leather, and slate. Soft, organic dithering with strong shadow detail.
• Stucki — slightly sharper than Jarvis, great for portraits with crisp eyes.
• Atkinson — high contrast, easy to clean up. Excellent on leather and stained wood where you want punch.
• Threshold — only when you actually want a two-tone black/white logo, never for photos.
• Grayscale — only useful when your laser supports real grayscale power modulation. On most diodes, leave it alone.

2. Always cut a 3×3 power/speed grid first

Open Laser Tools → Material Test and let LightBurn cut a small test pattern across a 3×3 grid of power and speed values. Five minutes here saves you hours of squinting at finished pieces wondering “is that too dark or too light?”. Save the result to your material library so you never have to re-test that piece of birch ply again.

3. Use the line interval that matches your dot size

Line interval is the spacing between scan lines. The rule of thumb:

• Diode lasers (3W–20W optical): 0.08–0.10 mm
• CO₂ 40–60W: 0.10–0.12 mm
• Fiber on metal: 0.025–0.05 mm

Smaller numbers = more lines per millimetre = darker engrave but longer run time. If your photo looks “banded” or you can see horizontal lines, your interval is too wide. If the result is mush, it’s too tight.

4. Rotate scan angle by 45° for portraits

The default 0° scan angle means every line runs perfectly horizontal. On faces, this can make hair, eyebrows, and shadows look striped. Set the layer’s scan angle to 45° (or 22.5° for an even softer effect) and the dot pattern hides the line direction. This single tweak makes pet portraits and people look dramatically more natural.

5. Don’t trust the screen — adjust gamma

What looks balanced on a bright monitor often engraves muddy. Bump Gamma to around 1.2–1.4 in the image properties panel before you send a photo to a darker material like walnut or stained pine. This lifts midtones without blowing out highlights.

6. Use “Pass-through” when you’ve already dithered

If you brought in an image that’s already been dithered (for example, from EngraveIQ’s engraving converter), set the LightBurn image mode to Passthrough. Otherwise LightBurn will re-dither already-dithered pixels, and you’ll get a smeared mess. Passthrough sends the file straight to the laser, dot for dot.

7. Set up a real material library

Under Window → Material Library, save every successful settings combo with a clear name (“3mm Baltic birch — engrave dark”). Tag each entry with material, thickness, and machine. Future-you will be grateful when a customer asks for “the same one as last month”.

8. Frame before every job — twice

Press Frame once with the lid open to check positioning, then close the lid and frame again to verify focus and lens position. The second frame catches the times you bumped a Z-table or forgot to refocus after swapping materials.

9. Overscanning matters more than people think

On galvo and gantry diodes alike, the laser’s head decelerates at the end of each line. Without overscan, the edges of your engrave will be darker than the middle. Set overscan to 2.5–5% for clean, even tones edge-to-edge.

10. Outline before engrave, not after

When you have a job with both an engrave and a cut/outline pass, set the engrave layer to run first. If you cut first, the cut releases the part from the surrounding material, and any tiny shift (smoke vibration, a draft, a sticky honeycomb) misaligns your engrave. Engrave first, then cut, then turn off the laser.

Bonus: when the image looks great but engraves flat

Nine times out of ten, the problem isn’t LightBurn — it’s the source file. A JPEG straight from a phone often has too much contrast in the highlights and crushed shadows. Run the photo through an engraving-aware converter first to balance midtones and pull out detail in dark areas, then bring the result into LightBurn. You’ll spend less time fighting power curves and more time at the laser.

EngraveIQ’s photo-to-engraving converter is built specifically to produce files that survive a Jarvis dither at 0.10 mm interval — the most forgiving combo across diode and CO₂ machines.