Make it cut on a laser.
Upload an image. Get vector paths a laser controller reads as cuts, not as a photo to engrave.
3 free previews left · no signup to try
Real vector craft — see for yourself
Your trace lands as genuine, editable SVG paths — the same clean vector work behind Clearly’s bee-ecosystem murals. Infinitely scalable, every path editable, ready for Cricut, print or the web. No embedded pixels, no tangled auto-trace mess.
Hand-authored on the Clearly canvas · editable SVG, not raster.
Stroke width is not a style here — it is the operation
Every laser controller decides what to do with a shape by how it is drawn, not by what you name it. A path with a hairline stroke and no fill is a cut. A filled shape is a raster engrave, where the head sweeps back and forth like a printer. Same artwork, two completely different jobs, ten minutes versus two hours. Most software conventionally maps operations by RGB colour as well — red to cut, blue to score, black to engrave — so the colours in your file are machine instructions, not decoration. An image traced into filled regions will engrave beautifully and cut nothing until you convert those fills to outlines.
What a laser cutter needs from the file
- Cut
- Closed path, hairline stroke (0.001 in / 0.025 mm), no fill.
- Score
- Open or closed path, same hairline, lower power in the controller.
- Engrave
- Filled region. The head rasters it line by line.
- Kerf
- ≈0.1–0.2 mm of material vanishes per edge. Offset outward for a press fit.
- Operation mapping
- By RGB colour in LightBurn / RDWorks. Common: red cut, blue score, black engrave.
- Duplicate paths
- Two paths on the same line burn twice. Deduplicate before sending.
How it works
High contrast traces best. A photo becomes an engrave; line art becomes cuts.
Outlines you want the beam to follow become hairline strokes; areas you want darkened stay filled.
In LightBurn or your controller, assign a layer to each colour and set power/speed per material.
Free watermarked preview. $10 unlocks the clean, exclusive commercial file — emailed, no account, no subscription.
FAQ
Because the shapes are filled rather than stroked. A filled region tells the controller to raster it; only a hairline-stroked path with no fill is read as a cut. Converting fill to outline changes the job from an engrave to a cut without changing how it looks.
The beam has width, so it removes roughly 0.1–0.2 mm of material as it travels. Parts come out that much smaller than drawn. For decorative work it does not matter; for anything that has to fit together, offset the path outward by half the kerf.
Yes. Glowforge accepts SVG and infers operation from stroke versus fill in the same way, though it presents the choice in its own interface rather than by colour mapping.
Yes — the $10 unlock is an exclusive commercial licence for that file, including physical products you cut and sell.