Simple lightburn settings tutorial for laser engraving

Hey folks, TechNiverse back again with another video on light burn. This one is going to be a simple how-to on what settings to adjust when you first get light burn and things you might want to take a look into and know what they are. So firstly we're going to open edit here and we're going to go into settings and we're going to take a look at the units and grids. So depending on what kind of laser you have you are going to want to make sure you pay attention. So if you're using a co2 laser or your stuff is set to millimeters per second or inches per second or whatever inches per millimeter per second or any of that you're going to want to change to a diode setup assuming that that's what you're using because most home lasers are. There are in fact a few shop lasers that you can get for co2 but a little bit on the spendier side. So most commonly we're going to be working with these ones here and this is what we want. We want millimeters per minute that is what all of my settings are going to be based on. So as you're watching these videos make sure that this setting is set to the same as mine or you're definitely not going to get the same result. If you're having trouble with light burn or it seems overly complicated you can turn on beginner mode and it will kind of reduce things and give you a simpler interface and make it a little bit easier to work with. However I don't recommend it as a lot of this stuff is going to be very useful later on so you're going to want to slowly get acquainted with it as you go. The other two settings I wanted to mention in particular today are firstly a setting I mentioned before that is the dpi and that stands for dots per inch. I have mine set to 318 and I'm going for really high detail with this. It should work pretty well and I've gotten great results. I also have it set to negative image because in my case I'm burning a lot of canvases and not necessarily wood and things like that. You can turn this off or on depending on what you're doing. I would recommend for your cases, most cases, anything you just want to engrave that you're not removing a surface such as a layer of paint to leave it off because the negative image is really going to give you the reverse of what you want. So if you're trying to get a black outline leave it off. If you're trying to get a white outline you want to turn it on. That hopefully made sense to you. The other thing I wanted to touch on in here is as you can see this is my scanning order. It is going to go left to right up and then back to the left and it is going to burn in both directions and that is set here by bi-directional scanning. If I turn that off you can see all the arrows go back the other way but it still has to make that travel back in the reverse direction. So this saves us some time and utilizes the reverse motion to also burn the image in which effectively cuts our time in half for how long it takes to burn an image. The last thing I wanted to say that has to do with this right here is your scan angle. So my laser is going to be placed here at this dot at the home position. However if I change my scan angle 180 degrees you can see that it is now placed in the top right corner. It's going to start by scanning backwards and down. So using this is how you're going to manipulate which direction your laser is spinning. If you want to go from the bottom to the top and scan side to side instead of up and down then you change it to either a 90 or 270 degree angle. Don't recommend using angles such as 45 degrees because not only does this reduce your cutting area it also can give you a funky result. However there are instances in which you're going to want to line up at a slightly different angle from what is technically the right angle and in most cases those are going to be weirdly shaped objects or things of that nature that you can't really true up with square. So let's go back to our original orientation and that is zero. That is what I get the best luck with and that's what we're going to leave at. If you would like you can increase the number of passes. This is good if you want to start off testing something and you think low power is better. You can turn the power way down, you can give it two or three passes and then you can stop it after the first second or third whichever you prefer. You just most likely will have to be watching your machine because it'll start the second pass immediately after completing the first so you won't get a job done warning or anything like that. It'll just burn deeper and deeper. It's also good for cutting through things if you're trying to cut through a piece of say plywood or something that's pretty thin you would want to increase the passes the thicker the wood gets. Of course you do have to keep in mind your focal point of the laser and how far into the object you'll actually be able to cut. Some thicker objects you might not be able to get all the way through so keep that in mind as well. I hope that this video was helpful to you. We're gonna jump right on out of here and I hope you guys leave a like, hit that subscribe button. If you have any questions or comments or there's anything you feel that I missed in this quick intro video leave them down below in the comment section below this video and I'll do my best to get back to you and update this when I can. I do have a lot more videos on how to do particular things in Lightburn planned such as how to mask objects. That's how I created this cool controller design that'll just burn the shape into the object so if you want to know how to do that I'll put a video up in the corner up here go ahead and click on that otherwise we will see you in the next one. Technivorous out!