Description
Turns a photo into a laser-cuttable line drawing. The whole picture is a spiral winding, thickening where the photo is dark and thinning where it is light. That variation is what creates the image.
You get an SVG at true 1:1 millimetre size, ready to send straight to a laser cutter.
Three steps
1. Pick a photo
Click Choose a file at the top left. You can also drop an image onto that area, or copy an image and press Ctrl/Cmd+V.
What works well
- Front-on, one person, face filling most of the frame
- Clean background — a plain wall or transparent background
- Real light and shade; flat lighting gives you nothing to work with
- Reasonably sharp, 1000 px or more on the long edge
Once you pick a photo the Image section folds away and the 3D preview appears on the right. Click Image again if you want to swap the photo.
2. Adjust three things
Everything ships with sensible defaults. In practice you only need these:
| What you want to fix | What to change |
| How big to make it | Width / Height |
| Face is flat, hard to read | Contrast |
| Too dark or too washed out overall | Open Advanced settings → Tone offset |
| Pattern too dense or too sparse | Open Advanced settings → Pitch |
When you change the size, the pitch and line thicknesses are recalculated to suit the new dimensions automatically — you don't have to chase them.
3. Check the preview, then export
Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom. The picker at the top right swaps the material (Metal / Acrylic / Plywood, nine options). That only changes how the preview looks — it does not change the shape being cut.
When it looks right, click Export at the bottom left.
The settings
Basics
Width / Height — the real size of the finished piece, in millimetres. On import the long edge is set to 200 mm and the short edge follows your photo's proportions. A common approach is to match a picture frame: A5 is 148×210, A4 is 210×297, 5×7 in is 127×178.
Check your laser bed fits it before you go large.
Thickness — how thick your material is. This only affects how solid the 3D preview looks; it does not change the cutting outline. 3 mm is the usual stock.
Crop shape — Rectangle or Ellipse. An ellipse reads more like a hanging medallion, a rectangle more like a framed picture.
Frame width — adds a border around the outside. It is not just decoration: the border also ties together lines that the crop cut through, keeping the piece in one connected part. Default is 2 mm and you rarely need to touch it. Set 0 for no border.
Keep — which part you are left holding after cutting.
- Dark (default): keeps the dark parts of the photo — hair, shadows — giving a dark portrait
- Light: the inverse, keeping the bright parts
Both work, but **Dark usually reads better**. Click between the two and compare.
Contrast — widens the gap between light and dark. Push it up when a photo looks flat or grey; the face gains depth.
Smoothing — rounds the outline and removes small jaggies. The 0.4 mm default is usually right. Too high and it sands away facial detail along with the roughness.
Advanced settings (collapsed by default)
You can normally leave these alone. Open them when you want finer control.
Pitch — the gap between neighbouring turns of the spiral, i.e. how dense the pattern is.
- Lower → denser → more detail, but past a point it breaks up into speckle, which you can see directly in the preview
- Higher → sparser → cleaner, but too sparse and the face stops reading
Centre X / Y — where on the image the spiral winds out from. The default is the top left corner, which fans the lines out across the frame like engraving hatch marks. Set it to 50 / 50 for a conventional centred spiral.
Tone offset — shifts the overall tone, deciding what gets thick lines and what stays blank. Turn it down if the result is too dark, up if it is too washed out.
Bridge pieces — on by default; leave it on. It joins separated parts with short thin links so the result cuts as one piece rather than falling apart into fragments.
Bridge width — how thick those links are. Sized automatically from your piece dimensions.
Despeckle — clears away fragments and holes that are too small to survive. They tend to drop out or scorch anyway. Turn it up if you see stray specks in the preview.
Questions
Will it fall apart into pieces?
No. Bridge pieces is on by default and connects everything into one part. What you see in the preview is the final shape.
The preview looks grainy and speckled
Pitch is too low — raise it. Making the piece physically larger also helps, since the same pattern has more room.
I changed photos and now the face doesn't read
Try pushing **Contrast** up first. If that doesn't do it, the source photo is probably too flat or the background too busy — use a front-on shot with a clean background and real light and shade.