Which Software Should I Use

There are basically two of steps involved in laser cutting/engraving, namely design/draw and then sending drawing to the laser.

Drawing

There are of course many applications out there suitable for drawing, but at the end of the day our preferred file format for importing into the laser cutting applications is SVG.

Due to this our preferred drawing application is Inkscape, a feature packed open source software package.

If there are any photo’s we need to edit before importing into Inkscape, we use GIMP, a very powerful open source photo/graphics editing package.

As the CO² laser and the diode laser both user different motherboard standards, sadly 2 different packages are required. The CO² uses an M2 motherboard and works perfectly with K40 Whisperer, another open source package that we cannot rate highly enough.

However, as the name of the package implies, it’s for the K40, so will not work with the diode lasers GBRL motherboards. So sadly for the diode laser a paid package is needed, which has an annual licence fee. That software is LightBurn.

Lightburn has a lot more ‘things to do’, aka ‘features’ each time you import your SVG for engraving or cutting, but cannot be faulted. You can also do some basic editing so can do some basic drawings or text.

The K40 Whisperer on the other hand is not an editor at all. You simply open your SVG and start engraving/cutting, no mess and no fuss.