How to Trace an Image in LightBurn

What to do if you have a great image that you want to laser cut, but not sure how to get it into LightBurn? Well good news! In this quick post, I’ll run through a quick tutorial of how to import an image into LightBurn and get it ready for cutting. Here are the few steps to follow:

1. Import Image into LightBurn
2. Trace the Image
3. Ungroup and Process Image

Import Image into LightBurn

LightBurn makes importing a very easy process and there are several ways to do it. You can click File -> Import, keyboard shortcut ctrl+I or click on this button on the top toolbar:

Navigate to the location of your saved image and then select it to be imported. LightBurn will import the image into the center of the workspace like this:

Trace the Image

Once the image is in the workspace, simply right click on the image and select trace image from the menu of options:

This will bring up the following Trace Image menu:

Here is where to edit the tracing settings to make sure that the image is properly captured. The sliding scale for threshold and cutoff will raise and lower the granularity with which the tracing is performed. Play around with the sliders until the purple trace lines are correctly around the image and select okay. This will trace out the purple lines onto the workspace. The picture can now be deleted and the workspace looks like this:

Ungroup and Process Image

Now that the image has been traced into the workspace, the final editing can be done. The design can be edited to be a different layer for different cut settings, changed in size, or deleted certain parts of the design. For instance, maybe the small intricate cuts in my design aren’t able to be processed so I want to remove them. I would select my design and right click -> Ungroup to break up the segments:

Then I would go through and delete out all of the small parts and finish up with what I would like to cut:

I hope this post will make life easier creating designs in LightBurn from images and that you learned something along the way! Feel free to check out any of our free project files to start cutting today!

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