LightBurn Image Settings for Photo Engraving
LightBurn gives you five image modes and a pile of sliders, and the documentation explains what each control does without saying which to pick. This guide takes the opposite approach: it starts from the result you want and works back to the settings. It also covers the case LightBurn cannot solve on its own — when the right move is to stop fighting the image mode and import a vector instead.
The Five Image Modes, and When Each One Wins
The Image Mode dropdown is the most consequential setting in the panel. Everything else is refinement.
- Threshold. Every pixel becomes pure black or pure white at a fixed cutoff. Use it for line art, logos, text and anything already high-contrast. On a photograph it produces a harsh, unrecognisable result.
- Dither. Simulates grey using a pattern of dots. Fast and simple, but the pattern is visually obvious and tends to look noisy on wood.
- Newsprint. Halftone dots, like an old newspaper photo. Works well on coarse materials such as plywood and leather where fine detail would be lost anyway.
- Stucki. Error-diffusion dithering. Generally the best-looking mode for photographs on wood — smoother gradients than Dither, better tonal range than Newsprint.
- Jarvis. Also error diffusion, slightly softer than Stucki. Often better on materials with high contrast response like anodised aluminium and painted surfaces.
Practical starting point: Stucki for photographs on wood, Jarvis for photographs on metal or coated surfaces, Threshold for line art. If you are engraving line art and using anything other than Threshold, that is almost certainly the source of your problem.
Settings That Actually Matter
Line interval (or DPI). How tightly scan lines pack. 0.1 mm (≈254 DPI) is a sensible general value. Drop to 0.06–0.08 mm for fine photo work. Going finer than your laser's spot size just adds time — a 0.08 mm diode spot cannot resolve a 0.03 mm interval, so you are burning the same material twice.
Speed and power. For photo engraving on wood with a diode laser, start around 3000 mm/min at 30–40% power. On CO2, roughly 300 mm/s at 15–20%. The settings cheat sheet has per-material starting values across machine types.
Scan angle. Default is 0°, engraving horizontally. Setting 45° often hides banding on woods with strong grain, because the scan lines no longer run parallel to the grain.
Overscan. Turn it on for image engraving. It lets the head accelerate before the burn starts, which prevents the darker edges you otherwise get where the head slows to reverse. 2.5% is usually enough.
Bi-directional scanning. Halves the time but requires a well-tuned machine. If your engraving shows a slight horizontal offset between alternating lines, the scanning offset needs calibrating, or turn bi-directional off.
Pass-through. Leave this off unless you have already dithered the image yourself in external software. If you have, pass-through stops LightBurn from dithering it a second time — double dithering produces mud.
Image Adjustments Inside LightBurn
LightBurn's Brightness, Contrast and Gamma sliders operate on the image before dithering, and they matter more than most people expect.
- Gamma is the important one for photos. Wood darkens non-linearly — mid-tones burn darker than the image suggests. Lowering gamma to around 0.7–0.8 compensates and preserves detail in the shadows.
- Contrast up slightly (10–20%) usually helps, because dithering flattens apparent contrast.
- Brightness up slightly on dark woods like walnut, where everything burns dark and shadows merge into a solid mass.
- Enhance Radius and Amount apply local sharpening. A radius of 3–5 with a modest amount recovers edge definition that dithering softens. Overdone, it creates halos.
Adjust these on a test strip rather than the final piece. A 20 x 20 mm crop of the most difficult area — usually the face — tells you what you need in two minutes instead of twenty.
When to Stop Adjusting and Import a Vector Instead
There is a category of job where no image mode gives a good result, and recognising it saves a lot of wasted material.
Photo engraving reproduces tone. That works when the material responds smoothly across a range of powers — birch plywood, anodised aluminium, painted tiles. It does not work when the material is essentially binary: it either marks or it does not. On dark hardwood, slate and leather, the difference between 30% and 60% grey is often invisible, so a dithered photo turns into noise.
For those materials, line art beats tone. Instead of engraving a photograph of a face, engrave a clean line drawing of it. The result is bolder, faster to run, and reads correctly from a distance.
The workflow is: convert the photo to line art with a line art converter, export SVG, and import it into LightBurn as a vector. Use Line mode for the strokes, or Fill for solid areas. There is no dithering involved at all, and no image settings to tune.
The same logic applies to anything with a hard edge requirement — stencils, silhouettes, signage and logos. SVG vs PNG for laser covers where the boundary lies.
A Working Test Procedure
Rather than guessing, run a grid. Twenty minutes here saves a ruined workpiece later.
- Crop a 20 x 20 mm section of your image containing both the darkest and lightest areas that matter.
- Duplicate it in a row of five, and set each to a different power: 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%.
- Run at your intended speed and line interval on the same material and same finish as the final piece.
- Look at it from a normal viewing distance, not from 10 cm. The best-looking square up close is often not the one that reads best from a metre away.
- Repeat once with a different image mode if the tonal range still looks wrong.
Keep the test tiles. A labelled drawer of them for each material is the single most useful reference a laser owner can build, and it is worth more than any settings table published online — including ours, because your machine, lens, air assist and material batch are all different from ours.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best LightBurn image mode for photos on wood?
Stucki is the usual best choice for photographs on light woods such as birch plywood or basswood. It uses error diffusion, which gives smoother tonal gradients than plain Dither and holds more detail than Newsprint. On dark hardwoods, consider converting to line art and importing a vector instead, since tonal range is very limited there.
What is the difference between Jarvis and Stucki in LightBurn?
Both are error-diffusion dithering algorithms and the difference is subtle. Stucki produces slightly crisper results and tends to look better on wood. Jarvis is a little softer and often works better on high-contrast surfaces such as anodised aluminium or painted metal. Test both on the same material — the difference is easier to see than to describe.
Why does my LightBurn photo engraving look washed out?
Usually the power is too low for the material, or gamma is uncorrected. Try raising power in 5% steps on a test strip. If the shadows are fine but mid-tones are pale, lower gamma to around 0.7–0.8 — wood responds non-linearly, and gamma correction compensates for that.
Should I dither my image before importing it into LightBurn?
Generally no. LightBurn's dithering is good and it works from the full-tone original, which gives it more to work with. If you do dither externally, enable Pass-Through so LightBurn does not dither the already-dithered image a second time — double dithering produces a muddy, patternless mess.
Why is Threshold mode giving me a black rectangle?
Threshold sends every pixel above the cutoff to black, so on a normally exposed photograph most of the frame qualifies. Threshold is meant for line art and logos, not photographs. Either switch to Stucki, or convert the photo to line art first and import it as a vector.