From a photo to an engraving

Vectorize a Photo turns a photograph into a file a laser engraves: an AI drawing of it, or the photo itself as black and white dots. It is not a stack of sheets like the other two studios. One photo in, one engraving out, sized for your material.

The three styles

A photo has thousands of greys and a laser has two settings, burn and do not. Each style is a different way across that gap.

• Pen & ink. A pen-and-ink portrait engraving, drawn fresh with your photo as its reference rather than traced from it: clean black contour lines, fine detail lines and controlled stippling for skin, clothing folds, hair and depth, with faces kept recognisable and every face and neck kept light and clean, never a solid black shadow. Clothing keeps its patterns, folds, seams and accessories, and whatever is really behind the people stays, a little quieter than they are; an empty or dark background stays mostly white. Where a new photo starts.
• Line art. A colouring-book page: bold, thick outlines, faces drawn with clean simple lines and left bright, clothing inked in detail - a thick, tapered stroke for every fold and wrinkle, seams, pockets and buttons drawn in, a plaid drawn as its real stripes - dark hair and shoes solid black, clothing of every colour drawn by its outline and folds, whatever is really behind the people drawn in the same bold style, and an empty or dark background - a plain wall, the sky, a dark stage - left white. The cleanest engrave, the fastest to burn, and the one style that also comes as an SVG.
• Dither. No AI at all. The photo itself is resized to the engraving and turned into a fine pattern of black and white dots on our server, the way newspapers printed photographs. Free, and as faithful to the photo as a black-and-white picture can be - but it is the photo, not a drawing of it.

The style buttons on the left switch between them at any time. A redraw you have made is kept with the photo, so switching from pen and ink to line art and back costs nothing after the first of each.

Line art + stipple and Stipple, two earlier styles, have been retired; Pen & ink is the style with stippled shading now, and the Shading slider went with them. A photo that was set to one of them opens on Pen & ink; its Line art, if it has one, is still there, and the drawings made in the retired styles are no longer shown.

Redrawing with AI

Choose one of the AI styles and press Redraw. One call to OpenAI sends your photo with an instruction to keep the same people, faces, expressions and clothes and to draw them in the style you chose, in pure black on white. For Line art, gpt-image-2 redraws the photo; for Pen & ink, gpt-5 reads your photo as the reference for a new drawing, rather than a picture to trace, and has gpt-image-2 draw it. Every redraw is one AI call, in either style. It usually takes under a minute. You can leave the page while it runs; the result is kept with the photo, and the studio picks the wait back up when you return.

Framing. People fill the page, the default, lets the AI compose the drawing around the people: they fill a tall or wide page, and the empty space above and below them is cropped away. Keep my framing keeps every part of your photo where it is instead. It applies to the next redraw; a drawing already made keeps the framing it was made with.

Remove background. Remove background asks the AI to draw the people only, on plain white - no wall, scenery or floor, no shadows behind them. It is part of the redraw itself, so it costs nothing extra, and like Framing it applies to the next redraw. The dither has no AI and always keeps the photo as it is.

Each redraw costs 36 credits for a tall or wide photo and 45 for a square one - or nothing on your own OpenAI key. The button says it before you press it: "1 AI call · 36 credits" on a tall or wide photo. The photo's shape decides which: anything noticeably taller or wider than square is drawn on a tall or wide page. A call that fails, or that OpenAI's safety check declines, is refunded.

Refining a drawing

A drawing that is nearly right is usually better changed than drawn again. Under the style buttons, Refine takes a sentence in your own words - "still a little dark, lighten the faces and necks", "less stippling - keep it lighter" for Pen & ink, "make the outlines bolder" for Line art - and sends it with the drawing on screen, not the photo, so what was already right stays as it is. Each refinement is one AI call and costs the same as a redraw: 36 credits for a tall or wide photo, 45 for a square one, or nothing on your own key.

Keep each one to a single change; refine again for the next. The drawing a refinement replaces is kept under Earlier versions, the last eight of each style, and Use this brings one back - free, and the one it replaces is kept in turn.

Photos of people go to OpenAI to be redrawn; see the privacy policy. Only a downsized copy is sent - the photo you upload is turned upright, made no larger than 2048 pixels and saved without its EXIF data, so a phone's location never leaves your device's file. Upload only photos you have the right to use, of people who would be happy to see them engraved.

Size

Width is how wide the engraving is on the material, in millimetres; the height follows from the photo. DPI is how many dots per inch the PNG has. Type the number you want over the one there — it is taken when you press Enter or click away — or step it with the arrows. Width goes from 20 to 1000 mm and DPI from 100 to 1200; a number past either end is set to that end. The PNG carries its DPI inside it, so LightBurn and most laser software import it at exactly the size you set, with nothing to type.

Match the DPI to your laser's line interval: 254 DPI is a 0.1 mm interval, 300 is about 0.085 mm. More DPI than the beam can resolve only makes the file bigger. The size line above the controls says how many pixels the file is; the studio makes files up to 40 million pixels, which is 600 mm wide at 300 DPI for most photos.

For Pen & ink and Line art, Width and DPI are the only settings. They change how many pixels the PNG has, not how it looks, so the picture on screen stays as it is when you move them and only the size line changes.

Invert, on the Dither, burns the white instead of the black, for dark materials where the burn is the light part: slate, black tile, anodised metal. For a Pen & ink or Line art PNG, use Negative Image in LightBurn's image settings instead.

What you see is what you download

Pen & ink and Line art have two views above the picture: Photo, the photo you uploaded, and AI redraw, the drawing as the AI made it. The AI redraw is what you download - the PNG is that picture, looking exactly as it does on screen, made Width wide at your DPI. A photo that has a drawing opens on the AI redraw: when a redraw or a refinement finishes, when you open the photo again from the list or come back to the page, and when you switch back to a style already drawn. A style not drawn yet shows the photo.

The Dither has Photo and Dither. Its dots are the result, so it opens on them, and every setting under Size and Tone shows there as soon as you move it, with "Making the dither…" for the second or two it takes.

Grey in the drawing, and your laser

The AI draws its lines with soft grey edges, and Pen & ink shades in grey as well - fine grey texture for skin, clothing folds and depth. The PNG keeps all of it, exactly as drawn: nothing is cut to black and white, turned into dots or cleaned up on our side. A laser either burns or does not, so what becomes of the grey is decided in your laser software, by the image mode you choose for it - and its preview shows the result before you burn:

• Threshold - in LightBurn's image mode - cuts every pixel to black or white at the middle grey: crisp black lines, their soft edges trimmed, light shading dropped. The usual choice for Line art.
• A dither mode such as Stucki or Jarvis turns grey into fine dots, so Pen & ink's shading keeps its tone on the wood.
• Negative Image burns the white instead of the black, for slate, black tile or anodised metal.

A small test burn at your settings is worth it; the same drawing looks different on cherry and on birch.

Tone, for the dither

• Dither - how the grey is spread into dots. Stucki gives smooth, even dots and is the usual choice for photos on wood; Floyd-Steinberg is finer and grainier; Atkinson is crisper with brighter highlights.
• Brightness and Contrast - as in any photo editor.
• Mid-tones (gamma) - above 1 lightens the mid-tones. Wood burns darker than a screen shows, so 1.2 to 1.6 usually engraves truest; the default is 1.3.
• Sharpen - crisper edges before the dither, so faces do not dissolve.

The dither is made at the exact size and DPI you set, because a dither cannot be resized afterwards without ruining it - which is also why the preview of a dither looks grey when it is shrunk to fit the screen. Actual pixels shows it dot for dot.

Your photos

Every photo you upload is kept in your account with its redraws, refinements and settings, and is listed on your account page with the other studios' projects. In the studio, the folder button at the top left lists them all, newest first, each with a thumbnail - click one to open it. The box beside it is the photo's name, taken from the file you uploaded; type over it to rename it.

New photo starts another: it opens the upload page and your file chooser, and the photo you had open stays exactly as it is, in the list. Close photo puts the open one away, as in the other studios: nothing more is saved to it from this browser - in this tab or any other - and a reload does not bring it back, until you open it again from the list.

Delete photo at the right of the same bar deletes the open photo, and delete beside each photo in the list deletes that one. Either asks first. Deleting takes the photo, every redraw and refinement of it and its earlier versions, and cannot be undone; credits spent on its redraws are not returned. A photo cannot be deleted while a redraw or refinement of it is being drawn - wait for the drawing to arrive, then delete it.

Downloading

Every PNG is Width wide at your DPI and carries that DPI, so LightBurn imports it at the size you set.

• PNG, Pen & ink and Line art - the AI redraw, exactly as drawn: soft grey edges, and in Pen & ink grey shading, only made to your size. In LightBurn, choose the image mode: Threshold for crisp black lines, or a dither mode such as Stucki or Jarvis to keep grey shading as dots, and Negative Image for dark materials. See Grey in the drawing, and your laser.
• PNG, Dither - a 1-bit, black-and-white PNG, the dots already made. In LightBurn, engrave it with the image mode set to Threshold (or Pass-Through): dithering it again would spoil it.
• SVG - Line art only. Filled black shapes traced from the drawing, in millimetres, for a fill engrave or for editing in a drawing program. Lines thinner than 0.15 mm are thickened so the beam burns them as lines, and specks smaller than 0.02 mm² are left out. Pen & ink's shading and the Dither's dots do not trace into shapes, so those two come as a PNG only.

Questions