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Hey, A couple weeks ago I was testing Image Lab, my new tool for preparing photos for laser engraving, on my own machine. The results were bad. I’m talking muddy, banded, obviously wrong. The kind of output that makes you feel like you’ve never touched a laser in your life. I stared at it for a minute before I figured out what had happened. I’d completely forgotten about line interval. With a 40W diode, the beam is way wider than you’d think. And if your line spacing is too tight, those lines pile on top of each other and you get an overburned mess. The fix is simple: you just need to know your actual dot size and match your interval to it. The problem is I didn’t have a fast way to visually figure that out. So I made a test for it. You set your machine, it generates a fill pattern in LightBurn at different DPI settings, you burn it on your material, and you can see exactly where your lines start overlapping versus separating cleanly. Five minutes and you know your machine’s sweet spot. Then I figured, as long as I’m at it — I built a few more. Power & Speed to find your material baseline. Dot Width Compensation for fine detail work. Material Thickness to nail your focus. They all live free in the Calibration section. No subscription, no credit card. They generate LightBurn files, you burn them, enter your results, and Laser Lab remembers the profile for each machine and material. → Run your calibration tests here (free) Laser on! Brandon The Auto-Enhance is the part I'm most proud of. It's not a brightness slider. It applies pro-level tone mapping, local contrast, and curve adjustments — but unlike Photoshop, it knows your laser's actual physics. It's adjusting for how dots will physically overlap on your material, not how pixels look on a screen. The result is a live preview that shows individual dots at real mm scale. What you see is what you engrave. → Check it out inside Laser Lab on a Founder Plan! |