I began by finding a cutting board that would work well with a laser engraving.  I found this nice little cutting board online that is made of walnut.  It is about ½ of an inch thick and about 10x5 inches.  I thought it would look best to only have the engraving on the lower half of the board and position it so that the sky leads into the handle.  I also considered how the board could be positioned on display in a kitchen.  For this design, it could be hung by the hole in the handle, so this orientation makes the most sense.

On my particular cutting board, I am excluding the handle which leaves about a 5x7 inch space to engrave in the portrait orientation.   

In my XCS software, I have added in an image of a barn in front of the Grand Teton mountains.  I want to remove the sky on the image, so I begin by selecting the image on the workspace.  Using the bitmap image tools I selected “Edit image” and then use the magic wand tool to click on the sky of the image.  This removes the sky down to the tops of the mountains.  

When engraving images, I have found it is helpful to adjust the grayscale slide to get the highest contrast  I also think the Jarvis bitmap mode is the best for engraving on wood.

Finally, let's adjust the size of the image.  My goal here is to size it just slightly larger than the cutting board.  I want the image to go all the way to the edge and I am ok with it cutting off just a little of the edges.  In my settings for the width, I set it to just over 5 inches and let the height adjust accordingly to keep the aspect ratio.

With everything configured, we now need to align the cutting board on the laser.  The trick here is to get the laser to frame the lower half of the cutting board.  I find it very useful to use the red laser to help line this up.  It takes a little trial and error, but the alignment lasers makes it quick and easy.