how to mask an image in lightburn - for laser engraving!

Hey folks, TechNiverous here and we are about to show you some masking techniques in Lightburn that'll help you achieve some pretty awesome effects. So without any further ado, let's talk tech. I have Lightburn open and we're going to find a cool image I have on my PC here and we are going to pop it in and we're going to use that for our manipulations. Now I'm going to kind of center mine on my screen here. Obviously you're going to want to align yours with what your build happens to be. My start is down here in the bottom left corner. So were I to actually engrave this, I'd be aligning everything using that. But for the moment, I think centered will work just fine. So what we have here is a image placed in a first layer. It is an image mode and this is an image layer. So if I take this and I go ahead and adjust some settings, I'm actually going to pick one of my presets here. This is the one I use on my canvases for burning colored pictures like you may have seen in my other video. Pretty simple settings. It is using a grayscale. I have negative image turned on and I'm running at 1600 millimeters a minute. Now if you're looking at yours and it says millimeters a second, that is because yours is set for a CO2 laser and you can simply do the math and make sure it's equivalent by multiplying or dividing by 60 or you can go to the settings and change it. It doesn't really matter. You just want to make sure that you're moving at an appropriate speed for your machine. Now I have a slightly increased speed because I have a slightly increased power. This allows me more output but sacrifices a small amount of detail. Now in this case, that sacrifice is pretty negligible and we're not really here to talk about that setting at the moment. So let's move on to why you came. Let's talk about the mask. And for this, we're going to bring in another object that we're going to use as a tool object. And if you don't know, these two layers right here are tool layers. So let's create a simple square or circular mask. You can do this with any of these over here. You can create a polygon yourself. We're just going to grab a circle and make it easy. And we're simply going to draw a nice oval around part of the object that we would like to keep. Now as you can see, it's still set to layer two up here. We're going to go ahead and click tool one. So we've set it to tool and it is set to frame and show. However, it hasn't done anything to our objects. So what we need to do is select them both by going back to the arrow here and then shift selecting the image as well. And then going to tools, apply mask to image. And it's as simple as that. So now when I burn this image, I will receive only the part that is in the mask, not the part that is masked itself. So if I wanted to burn a particular shape, this would be the way that I would do it. Now, what else can you do with this tool? Let's see. Let's go ahead and just select the frame itself. And we can delete that and it simply goes away. What if we want to do something slightly more complicated? I have another image here and this is not a vector graphic. This is actually a PNG. Okay. And it is a simple PNG of the outline of a PlayStation controller. So what we're going to do with this is pretty much the same thing. So let's go ahead and, oh, it won't let us turn this image into a tool layer. So what we need to do is right click on the image and click trace image. This will give us an outline of the object. And as long as it's pretty solid, somewhat like a vector graphic, it should work pretty well. There you have it. We now have an outline, which has automatically changed to a tool because I haven't taken it out of that layer. So with this, we can do the same thing. Let's line her up somewhere pretty in here. In fact, let's make her a lot bigger here so you can get the full effect. Okay. And we're simply going to do the same thing. Now I have the picture selected. So this time I'm going to shift click and select the mask as well, or the tool. And then I'm going to go to tools and apply mask to image. And there you go. It's as simple as that. So another quick note, you can manipulate the image behind the mask once you have the mask in place. So more important than placing the actual image itself to aligning it for your laser is placing the actual mask itself. In this case, I would take this guy and I drag it right on down here, align those two dots, make sure I'm within my build area, maybe give it a little bit of leeway because I want to have room for my print head. And then, then we can drag the picture over here and align it where we want it as well. So this is a really, really cool technique for using the tool layer on Lightburn. And I really, really hope that you enjoyed it. So leave a like down below. If you thought this video was useful, leave any questions you have about Lightburn down below, and I will look into them and see if I can't get you an answer. I'm going to be using this software quite a bit, and I hope that my use of it is relevant and useful to the community as well. So if you're looking forward to seeing more of these videos, make sure that you hit the subscribe button because I have quite a few ideas for cool tricks to show you. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So that is something you're not going to want to miss. That's going to be it for this one, guys. I appreciate you talking tech with me and Techniverous out. We'll see you in the next one.