What this does

What am I actually making, and what do I need?

This turns one picture into a set of flat sheets that stack on top of each other. Cut them, glue them up, and you get a piece with real depth — something that looks carved rather than engraved.

You do not draw the layers. You give the studio one picture, tell it how thick your material is and how many sheets you want, and it works out the shapes. Every sheet is cut on the same coordinate system, so the stack lines up.

Three studios

There are three ways to make a piece here, and the documentation below is split the same way so you can read only the part you need.

Stepped Layers takes one design — a mandala, an animal, a monogram — and cuts it at several depths, each sheet taking a little more away, so the piece steps down into itself. Every sheet shares the same outline.

Landscape Silhouette Layers takes a scene and splits it by distance, one sheet per depth: grass in front, then a fence, the cabin, the tree line, the moon. The sheets share a frame rather than a silhouette, and stacked they make a shadow box.

Vectorize a Photo is not a stack: it turns a photograph into one engraving for the laser to burn into wood, slate or tile - an AI drawing of it, in pen and ink or as line art, or the photo itself as black-and-white dots, free.

Not sure which? Which studio should I use? answers it in a paragraph.

What you need

A laser cutter and something to cut. Most people start with 3mm plywood or MDF, because it is cheap, it glues well, and three millimetres per layer gives obvious depth without the piece getting heavy.

You do not need to be able to draw. You can describe what you want and let the studio make the picture, or bring your own — see Artwork that works.

What comes out

A folder of SVG files, one per sheet, all the same size and all lined up. Each file is a single named group, so a cutting program lists it as one object. Open them in LightBurn or whatever software drives your cutter, cut each one, and stack them in order. Nothing else is needed and no style or export is locked behind a bigger plan. A photo engraving comes out as one PNG instead, sized to your width and DPI: the AI drawing itself, or the dither’s black-and-white dots.