30 Lightburn Tricks You Wish You Knew Sooner!

Welcome to the productivity lab, laser nerds. When we first opened LightBurn, we had no idea what half of those tools meant. Fast forward a few thousand projects later, and we got a couple of tricks up our sleeve. And today, we're going to share our top 30 LightBurn tips and tricks that will save you time and money. [Music] What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, build it, or make it? So do we. Today I am going to share with you my top 30 tips and tricks for life that I wish I knew on day one. There was a lot of fumbling around at first, but now I got a bunch of little things that I didn't even know that I knew that people pointed out at the jamboree. They were like, "Wait, how did you do that?" I was like, "Oh, it's just like this." So, I thought that I would share all of my little tips and tricks that I've learned with you today. Like, I'm excited about this one. I hope you're excited about this one. We're going to start with some beginner tips and tricks and work our way up to some pros. And we're going to put all of these in a spreadsheet so that you can have them and reference them later. We have another 20 of them over on our Patreon website, too. I felt like 50 was like way too many for a video, so I tried to pair it down to 25. I can only get down to 30. So, I'm going to give you our top 30. If you're a beginner, these first few tips are definitely for you. You got to get comfortable and confident with LightBurn to get started. Here we are inside LightBurn. I'm going to give you these next 15 tips rapid fire. So feel free to pause or give it a double boop to back it up 10 seconds. My first tip that I have is understand your selection behavior. So if I select going from left to right, anything that my little box here touches gets selected. Now if I select everything from the right to left, everything that's encapsulated by my box. Now you see that my box is red. Now everything that's encapsulated by this box gets selected. If I do the other way, right to left, you see that I have a green box and that's everything that my box touches gets selected. Tip number two, pan your canvas like a pro. You know that middle button and your mouse? That thing is so powerful inside LightBurn. First, it zooms, right? So, if you scroll it to and fro, it will zoom. But it zooms where your mouse is. It doesn't zoom middle of your board. So, if I put my mouse down here, it zooms to my mouse. And if I back up, it backs up from wherever my mouse is. So, if I move around, right, I can zoom in and out by moving my mouse. If I want to zoom in on this guy, I just place my mouse in the center of him and continue to zoom. Now, if it gets too crazy or I'm too far zoomed in, I don't even know where I am anymore, I can always come up here and click this little spy glass with the zoom to page or control Z and that will bring me back to filling my work area with my workb. But the best thing about your little scroll button here, yes, it zooms in and out, but if I press it, I can grab my workspace and move it around. So, it becomes a little hand that I can move my workspace around in. Right, that is the best part of this little scroll button right there. Tip number three, I love this tip. This is right click on the layer. It'll make everything blink. So, say I need to know what layer is what. If I come over here to my cuts and layers and I right click, everything that I just rightclicked on will blink. So, if you notice up here, I got this stray, right? And if I right click, I can easily find what what is on those layers. I love that. It's great for finding little pieces. If you're like, "What is on this layer? Everything in my everything on my work area is the same color, but I have this random layer." Right click on it, make it blink. you'll find it frame before you fire. So, I don't just select everything and hit frame. What I like to do is I come up here to my laser control area where I get to move around my laser. So, I can select this and I can move my laser to the middle of the selection. But how I do it is if I'm going to frame something, instead of waiting for the laser head to travel all the way to it, I'm going to frame it a couple of times. What I'll do is I'll come in and I'll say move laser head to the top right of the selection. Now I can go to my laser and I could place the material you where I think the top right of my design is. I know where it is because that's where my laser head is sitting. And then I can start to frame it. Saves a lot of time and guessing and a lot of laser head travel. Another one of my favorite tools is I have this checked right here. Cut selected graphics. So, if I have my design laid out in my workspace, but I don't want to cut everything, some things I don't want to cut out, or I just want them left alone, I only want to cut out certain things, I could come in and grab some items, and then with my cut selected graphics check, it's only going to perform the options on the things that I selected. So, we could test this out by going to preview, which is another one of my tips. Always check your preview to see what's actually happening. This is a good way to see what's getting engraved, what's getting cut, and if the items you think are getting cut are actually getting cut. Group and ungroup. This is kind of basic, but it's great for moving things around on your board. So, you could grab everything that you want to to have selected and you could come up here to a group or control G will group everything. And now, if I grab it, I can move it around. and control-U will ungroup everything. So everything's back to ungroup. Those are easy. There's no need to go all the way up to the top. A problem that I see a lot of people having out there is I think in inches. So I have a problem with millimeters, but my laser thinks in millimeters. So I like to design and lay my stuff out using inches. So what I do is I'll come up to tools. Oops, sorry. Edit. I'll go to edit settings. Then I go to units and grids and I make sure that inches and millimeters per second are selected. That way I can design and move my stuff around in my work area in inches and when I send it to the laser, the laser is thinking in speed per millimeters. Material test grids are a gamecher and these are super easy. It's going to save you a lot of material. Go ahead and run one. There's plenty of videos out there on how to run one. Um, just make sure you have this mode, line or fill, selected correctly so that you you're not engraving when you think you're cutting. But otherwise, this is a great way to find your actual settings so that you're not wasting material and burning things up. Now, when I'm moving things around on my board and I want to change the size, if I grab the side here, it's going to stretch it. And if I grab the top, it's going to stretch it even if my aspect ratio is locked. But if I grab a corner, it's going to stretch it and move it on the aspect ratio. And then if I want to change the size here, I can also come up and change the size here. But again, make sure your aspect ratio is locked. With my aspect ratio locked, I also want to rotate, but I want to rotate on 45s. That's easy to do. If I hold shift, otherwise I'm just rotating willy-nilly. Who knows where this thing is going to stop. But if I hold shift, it'll click on the 1545s and 90s. It's nice for when I'm trying to line pieces up that I may have to unalign later on. Another great tip, this isn't actually inside LightBurn, but if I'm not sure on a file, instead of wasting good material, I'll run tests on cardboard first just to make sure things will fit together or it's the correct size. Everybody's got Amazon boxes laying around. That is an easy way to just test your cuts first. Now, I'm not saying test your engraves on cardboard. Test your cuts. see if uh your your slots and tabs line up. I'm not I'm not saying they're going to fit, but you'll be able to tell if they line up. One of my favorite pieces that I did not know about until just a couple of months ago is this art library. Now, you can store things in this art library that you use all the time. Like I'm always making these little tags, right? So, I can just in my art library, drag this tag over. Um, I'm always losing our little focal height gauges, so I have one of those. And I put these things on everything, my registration marks. But this is a great tool right here. It's a easy way to grab some art or files that you use all the time. This for logos, you know, backers, frames. This is just a great place to put reusable things. It's like a giant clipboard. Now, keyboard shortcuts are key to your productivity. So, you some of these things act as you would think. You know, we got copy, which is Ctrl C. We got cut, which is Ctrl X. And we have paste. Now, paste pastes wherever my cursor is. Wherever my cursor is, it's going to paste that in the middle. So, I just move my cursor around and hit paste. And it's going to follow my cursor. A duplicate is pretty cool. If I select a few items, let's select these blue items, and I say control D, you notice that it looks like it stopped uh doing its marquee thing, but it actually put an exact duplicate right over top. This could be handy. I use it a lot for making duplicates of Yeah, exactly. This like rows of things. And we have controll Z. I live in Dip. Control Z. Um, and shift control-z is redo. So, control Z is undo and shift control Z is redo, just like in Illustrator. I like that. Finally, Ctrl S is save. I save all the time because I'm always moving things around and uh I don't need to crash. And out outside by the lasers, we use this crappy old laptop. So, save all the time. Oh, and my final big one that is if I'm in some other tool or I'm stuck in a tool, I don't know what tool I'm in. I'm trying to select things, but instead I'm drawing boxes. If you hit escape, it brings you right back to your selection tool. Now that you've got some of the beginner basics under your belt, are you still having trouble clearing your laser bed? Are you leaving little pieces trying to figure out how to grab everything at once? Now, we've got some intermediate steps for you. Some workflow, efficiency, and power moves. four moves to show you how to clear that bed quickly. Back in the LightBurn, we're going to work on our workflow, making sure everything is super efficient. So, I don't like to guess at what my layers are. I use my layers to organize my workflow. Every color has a function. So, for us, black is always going to be engrave, blue is always going to be a score, and red is always going to be a cut. Now over here, I'm able to move my layers up and down by which one's selected. What I like to do is if I have heavy engraves going, I like to put those after the cut. That way I know my bed is clear, my mirrors have no obstruction, and I have full power hitting that material. Then I'll do my engrave. If I have short engraves and then I have some scores, I'll do my short engrave first, then I'll do my scores to allow the bed to clear the smoke a bit, and then I'll do my cuts. Anytime I'm doing my cuts, I want to make sure my bed is clear. Another tool that I really love that saves me time are grid arrays. So, I can grab this whole thing and we'll shrink it a little bit. And if I come over here, I can start making a grid. I can add columns. I can add rows. It builds from the bottom up and then the left to right. And then I can change my spacing in here. And this is a great way to quickly lay out some stuff um that you're getting ready to work on. I like it. Use it all the time. Especially when I was doing those uh like race metals. I just bring them in, grid, array them up real quick, cut them out. Another great tool that's often overlooked is optimize cut path. So with everything selected, if I come into my optimization settings, you know, I can move some things around. I can make sure that I cut inner shapes first. Like if I'm cutting out an a zero or an O or a P, an R, something like that. I want to make sure that I cut out the inside before I cut out the outside. That way, if my material drops, it doesn't shift and I'm cutting out the center of the O somewhere else. I can also reduce travel. This will recalculate, so it'll do all of my cuts based on the least amount of head travel in between cuts. Reduce directional changes, but I really like this one down here. Remove overlapping lines. So, if I have two boxes or something buted right up against each other, or sometimes I don't separate all my pieces when I'm making a door hanger, I'll just remove overlapping lines. That way, things don't run across the same line twice and burn things up. But play with these settings in here to figure out what's right for your project. Create material test libraries. down here, there's this tab in the bottom right that gets often overlooked. So, now that I have everything laid out in here, you'll see that all my speed and powers are just whatever the default was. But, if I come in here, I'm able to save all the speed and power settings for all my different machines and my different materials. So, I'll be using the Eon Nova 14. I'm planning on cutting out MDF. So, I can click here. I can select my file that I have and then I'll say assign, but that's a great way. We have it set up for all of our lasers and all of our different materials that we use. So, if I open it up, I can go to the settings for laser one, two, three, or our Eon. Another tool that I love that I think is named wrong is this print and cut feature. So, you can do the wizard or whatever, but this is a great thing. Let's bring back my my window here, my art library. We'll drag these registration marks on. So, now that I have some registration marks on here, oops. Let's group them. Group. Group. Now that I have my registration marks on here, you know, it's not just used for like print and cuts where I'm printing something out with registration marks already there and then I'm cutting cutting it out. We use it for that all the time. But another big thing that we use it for are doing like oversized projects or passroughs. You know, if you do an oversized project and you're using your pass through, you're going to use these little registration marks to line up your next cut as it comes through. You know, it's great. And I also throw these registration marks on everything. I put them on every file now because if I had this file here, right, and we did the engrave and I did my score and I did my cut, but my maybe I was using plywood and I hate using plywood and it didn't cut through the plywood, but I didn't notice until after I pulled it off the bed. And now trying to line that up would be a pain in the butt, right? You're Are you just going to start fresh? You're just going to waste all that material. Not if you put registration marks. If you scored some registration marks into your material, what would it take an extra 15 to 20 seconds to score these guys here? That way, if your cut did mess up, throw it back in the bed, line up your registration marks using print and cut. Project saved, material saved, time, money. It's all been saved. Now, a setting that has saved my butt more than one time. We've had to do those those race medals and we had to do 500 race medals. And I had it so that it would engrave and score and cut. But what was happening was it would engrave all of the metals, then it would score all of the metals, then it would cut all of the metals. And if there was a hiccup in a cut somewhere, all of those engraves and scores and stuff were a waste. So what we did is we came into the optimization settings and you're able to order by layer which is the default. So that's when it's going to do the engrave score then cut. But we did we ordered by group and we brought that to the top. We clicked it twice and that way it would do each group of things. So I'm going to use this real quick. We'll make a quick grid array. Bam. Bam. Bam. With everything selected, let's go to my preview. Now, if I run it, well, now it's doing all the Oh, that's because they're all grouped. I use my grid array. See? Now, if I ungroup it, these things should be grouped together. Let's just make sure. Group. Group. And group. Now, if I grab these, we'll hit print preview. Now, it should do it by group. So, it should engrave one, score it, and cut it. There it goes. Now, if we go back to optimize settings, if we go back to layer, put layer back at the top and run it again, it's back to its old behavior. It's going to engrave each one. Mhm. Then, score and cut. Save a lot more time. You save a lot more headache doing it by group. A tool that I love that I use all the time and I feel like I've said that about everything so far is the offset tool. So if I just take this guy and I say I was making this a keychain. I didn't want to bring it into Illustrator, make a keychain and do all that stuff. Let's ungroup this. I'll grab this guy. I'm just going to grab this. We'll go over to my offset tool and we'll just specify an offset. We'll say outside. We'll give it some corners. Outer shapes only. Yeah, let's go outer shapes only. I don't want to delete this. Select the resulting object. Yep. That way I can change its attributes right away. And I want to optimize this, you know, that way if it's um got wonky corners or whatever, it'll take out extra nodes. There you go. We'll put this on the red layer. It was an easy way to make an offset. So now I can engrave and cut. What did it take? 30 seconds. My next one that I love that we use every day. I mean, I feel like I say that about all of these. I I love them all. They're all like my babies, like I said. Okay, so it's the tabs. I love the tabs. We're going to grab these guys, right? And over here, what a tab is, if I start adding tabs. Well, first, let me double click on my layer, and I'm going to enable tabs. Let's make sure this is checked right here. And now, do not use automatic. Automatic puts them everywhere. It gets all willy-nilly with it. See, it gets crazy even if you back it down. I don't need them everywhere like that. So, we'll go manual. Okay. Now, we'll come over here to this tab tool. Add tabs. I'll click that. Holding control, I can grab this. Now, I'm just going to add some tabs here. This will keep all my little pieces in. What a tab is doing is as the laser is going, right? It's going to skip these little pieces here. And you can specify the little pieces that get skipped um in your layers tab. So everywhere where I put one of these little dots, I just hovered over the line and clicked. And to hover to to delete it, if I hover over the dot and click again and hold shift, it will delete it. And if I add it, I just click and delet to delete it, I just hold shift, boop, we put them back. So we have our default power set at 35. And because we run these cuts, we run them at 10 and 50. And we want just this little piece of material, right? The the size is 0197. It's going to skip that gap. You know, it'll skip it or it'll just decrease the power as it goes over that place. So, we want the power the power to be decreased because this is quarter inch. We need to be able to pop it out pretty easily, but I want it to be held in while I'm working on it or trying to clear the bed. So, that leads me to my last tip for this section. This is the easiest way to clear your bed right here. I gave this name an offset, right? So, I created a frame using the offset. I'm going to cut the frame out. I'm also going to cut the letters out. And to keep the letters inside that frame, I use my tabs. So, now I don't have to clear all these little pieces out. I just when I'm done, I just pull this whole little this whole little thing out. The whole little thing with the frame and all the pieces stuck inside. And now we're going to show you some pro productivity and some power user tools. Have you ever had a cut stop in the middle and you want to pick up right where you left off? We got some tricks for that. These next five tips are for the pros. Let's see if I can give you one more trick for your tip tool bag. When we're doing like those race medals where I have a lot of different names or like say these back to school pencils where everybody has a different name to put on these pencils, it's easy way to just go ahead and assign this a variable using a percent sign. And then up here you can just change your text type to merge SVG or merge CSV. And then you can assign all of these variables. Let's move this here. Assign all these variables using some variable text. And you can go out and pick it up out of an SV S CSV file. Sheesh. CSV. You can grab it from a CSV file or an Excel file. And then you can just add all of your names that way. It's quick and easy. Test it. This is what will actually show up. I love that for the pencils. Oh, and those race medals. That's that was key for the race medals. Did you know that you could set up multiple devices using one instance of LightBurn? So, if I need to run multiple jobs, but I only have one license. I'm able to add multiple devices here. Or I'm able to select, let's select laser one. I don't know if it's on, but I could start this job here. Switch back over to laser 2. Start the job there. Oh, it did. It is on. Oh, no. Device found. Laser's not on. Let's see if laser 3 is on. I could. Yep. Found. So, I can start this job here on laser 3. And then we'll move this out of the way. And then I can start my other job back on the Eon. And they're allworked. So, we just do that through some Wi-Fi. connected them all to one hub that's a wireless router in the back and then connect it through Wi-Fi. Pretty easy. If you're trying to do a large shapes or a pass through, right, there's no way to actually fit this in my laser bed. The easiest way to do that is to add some registration marks, right? This is how you do that pass through. So, we'll go back to my window art library. Let's give this some registration marks down here. All right. Boom. Now I can grab my big A. Well, let's draw a box. I'm going to draw a box where I want to cut. Right about there at those registration marks. So, escape will bring me back to my selection tool. Select my A, hold shift, select this box, go up to tools, cut shapes. Bam. Now, this is actually in two shapes. So, I'm able to select my registration marks, select my item, run my cut, move everything to the top. All right. Well, I should have cut it one more time. Line up my registration marks, do a print and cut, and cut the bottom half out. I mean, it really is that easy. A big time saver, one of my biggest times savers, build yourself a jig. So what we did is we took our laser bed. We laid a giant sheet of material in there. We used quarter inch MDF. We laid it in the laser bed. We aligned it all the way left and all the way bottom. Then we came into LightBurn and we drew us a square that was the entire size of our laser bed. And I want to line everything up to the bottom left in my bed. So once this was selected, I then came up here and I said move to lower left. And this will move this to the lower left of my bed. Then I cut this out. Now, anytime I bring material in or a new design in, right, I know how big my my material is. If I just laid a sheet of MDF in there and it's 36 by 48, I know that I can come out to 48 inches wide on my design. And as well, I can come out to 47 whatever inches on my design. And as long as I have it down here in the corner, I really don't need to frame it. I know it's going to land on my material. But that saves me so much time. I don't have to spend any time framing this or moving the head. I know where my material is, how big it is. I know it's in the bottom lefthand corner. I know my design will fit on the material and go. Saved me so much time. Another big timesaver. This is the last one. I might have saved the best for last because this has saved me so many times. And I know I keep bringing up the race medals because we do them every year and every year there's some type of hiccup. So halfway through my design, the power went out and then when I turned the laser back on, it didn't recognize that there was a job. And I was like 100 through a sheet of 150. And I did not want to waste them all. I didn't want to move the board. So what I was able to do is I came into my preview, right? I found exactly where it left off. like exactly where it left off in all those engravings. Like I was able to play it and really get it to exactly where it was. And then I said, "Start here. Send job to laser from here." And it picked up like nothing had happened. I was able to save the entire sheet of race metals. this right here. I I'm hoping I saved the best for last and taught you something new. What tip was your favorite tip? I these are all my favorite tips. It's hard for me to pick. They're like my kids, but I'm going to say the the the start from the mid using the the preview print preview starting from any point. I think that's a good one. It's saved me a ton of times. I think throwing registration marks on all of my boards has saved me so many cuts because I'm able to come back in and line it up if it didn't cut or didn't cut through. Those are your advanced ones. Some of the vape fix of just clicking and holding that mouse button, being able to drag stuff around on the screen. Those are pretty cool beginner tips. Quick zoom in, zoom out. Some of those I still don't remember. Which reminds me, download this reference guide down below so that you can post these up on your wall and remember some of these cool things that we've mentioned in the video today. And don't forget, you can get 10 more over on Patreon in a second spreadsheet. I got the whole 50. Well, I am about out of time. I have to get back into LightBurn and learn some more things. And a big thanks to the Make It Mia. We love you guys. That is the best way to support this channel. Oh, and I have an illustrator class that I do the first and second Tuesday of every month. In fact, it just happened this past Wednesday. And there's another one coming up next Wednesday. Not just an illustrator class, it's designing for laser crafters. So, I'm going to touch on Illustrator, but I'm also going to hit Photoshop. I'm going to hit photo room, a little bit of Canva, LightBurn, Creative Space, everything that I use in my normal day. That's the class.