Design laser cutting and engraving files in your browser
Laser Studio is a design editor for laser cutters and engravers that runs in a web browser. Open a project from xTool Creative Space, xTool Studio, LightBurn, RDWorks or EZCAD, an SVG drawing or a photo, change it or start from nothing, and save it for the software that runs your machine.
It works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebooks, at home or on a school computer, with nothing to install. The machine itself is still run from its own software: Laser Studio prepares the file.
What you can do
- Draw rectangles (with rounded corners), ellipses, polygons, stars, straight lines and curves, at exact sizes in millimetres.
- Edit shapes point by point: move points and curve handles, add and delete points, make corners smooth or sharp.
- Add text in the fonts that come with the app or in your own TrueType and OpenType fonts. Text is turned into letter outlines, and script fonts can be welded into one outline so a name cuts out in one piece.
- Combine shapes: join, subtract, keep the overlap or remove it, and draw an offset outline around shapes or lines (for borders, kerf or stencils).
- Arrange: move, resize, rotate, flip, align, distribute, group, lock, and make copies in a grid or around a circle.
- Engrave photos: adjust brightness, contrast and gamma, invert for dark materials, and preview the dot pattern the laser burns with Jarvis, Stucki, Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, ordered or threshold dithering.
- Trace pictures into shapes: the outline of a logo or drawing to cut, single lines along pen strokes to score or engrave, every colour of a logo on a layer of its own, or line art with thin strokes as lines and thick parts as shapes. A preview shows the result over the picture while you change the settings, and the traced shapes land exactly on top of the picture.
- Set up layers by colour: each layer is a cut, a score line, a fill engraving or a picture engraving, with its own power, speed, passes, line interval or resolution.
- See the job time: an estimate for each layer and the whole job, for the work area of your machine.
What it opens and saves
| Opens | Saves |
|---|---|
| xTool Creative Space and xTool Studio projects (.xcs, .xs) | xTool project (.xcs) for the machine you choose |
| LightBurn projects (.lbrn2, .lbrn) | LightBurn project (.lbrn2) |
| RDWorks projects (.rld) and Ruida jobs (.rd) | RDWorks V8 project (.rld) |
| EZCAD marking projects (.ezd, .ez3) | SVG drawing, with an optional legend of the settings |
| SVG drawings | DXF drawing |
| Pictures: PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, WebP | A PNG picture of the design |
Saved files keep every layer with its type and settings, so a design made for an xTool can be opened in LightBurn or RDWorks and the other way round. The SVG and DXF files open in almost any design or laser program, such as Inkscape, Illustrator or Glowforge's app.
Power and speed
Settings that come from your file are kept exactly. New layers start with moderate values marked as starting values. Every laser, lens and material behaves differently: check each layer's settings for your machine and test on scrap before you cut the real piece.
Your work and your files
Your design stays in your own browser while you work on it, and is kept there between visits on the same device. When you open or save a file, or trace a picture, it goes to our server to be read or written: uploads are deleted as soon as that is done, and saved files are deleted after 30 minutes.
Limits
- Laser Studio does not connect to machines: frame and run the job in your machine's own software.
- Combined and offset shapes are made of short straight segments (fine enough for laser work), not curves.
- xTool features without an equivalent elsewhere (colour engraving, relief, blade and pen tools) open as plain engrave, cut or score layers.
- PDF, Illustrator and DXF files can't be opened yet: export them to SVG first.
- Tracing works best on clear pictures: logos, drawings and scanned line art. Photos turn into many small shapes, and faint or very thin lines can come out broken or a little short at their ends, so check traced lines before cutting.