Make cutting out custom shaped and sized labels or stickers a piece of cake: Print & Cut in LightBurn Software is a practical tool to save you time.
There are a couple of things to check before heading in to try out this feature. One of the most important things is that you have set up your LightBurn Camera inside an enclosure to the right height in comparison to your laser cutter's structure. For advice on the topic, see our help page right here.
To begin using this feature, first print your stickers or labels on an adhesive sheet. After that, place it on the honeycomb bed of your laser cutter. You don't have to be exact with aligning the sheet in the center, or aligning it to any corners. We will explain shortly why!
An important element that you must have on your sticker sheet is two crossmarks on extreme ends of the sheet, so make sure these are on the printed out version of your workpiece before heading into using the feature. These will make sure that the Camera will perform aligning well in the later steps.
After positioning your sticker sheet, let's head back to LightBurn Software.
Import the digital version of your stickers, and make sure that the LightBurn Camera is turned on and is recording in your machine.
Before you start the Print & Cut Wizard, trace the image with the shown option.
Adjust the settings until you are happy with the preview result. You will not have to use the traced images for your Print & Cut experiment, however they are needed to make an offset outline. Later, this is what your laser cutter will go through to cut out your designs.
Find the "Offset Shapes" option.
This setting will help you generate your desired sticker outline.
What we did here was to duplicate the outer edge of the design, and then adjust that with the new settings we made up. Place this new outline onto a new layer by clicking on a new colour in the palette on the bottom of the software.
Now, to the tricky Print & Cut Wizard. Find the first crossmark. But before you do anything to it, make LightBurn produce an image of the laser bed with your workpiece on it.
Click on "Update Overlay" to get an image.
Find "Print and Cut", and then "Start Wizard".
You have to pay attention here a little! To set up the crossmarks on your design, you have to physically make the laser jog to the position of where the crossmark center is at on the sheet you printed. If you try to register the second crossmark after the first, but you did not yet jog the laser to the second target on your sheet, the software will return a distance error.
Try to aim for absolute center!
After both targets are set up, the software will ask you to adjust scale or to keep as is. You can try out what works for you best at the current experiment. Keep in mind that depending on the overlay image, you might have to move your outlines to match the image your LightBurn Camera took. It is best you do this before you set up the targets, but if you notice it afterwards, all you have to do is to reset the Wizard and start over with positioning the laser cutter over your sheet again. Once all is set up, let's cut!
Print & Cut is an extremely helpful feature to save you time in cutting out labels or stickers in bulk very quickly - or anything else really! It takes a little effort to set up at first (it took us a while as well!), but once you understand how it works at the basics, you will probably never consider cutting out a dozen stickers by hand again.
If you want to learn more technical details about the Print & Cut Feature, find LightBurn's official documentation right here.
We recommend checking out this video by Laser Livestream and this video by LightBurn to see a more in-depth explanation of the feature and how to offset text and other shapes.
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Happy making!
