Laser Photo Wizard - with Generators

Laser Engraving Photo Software for Windows
Version 12

Laser Photo Wizard Pro is powerful laser engraving software for creating images ready for Laser Photo Engraving. The system offers extensive controls to convert gray scale photos to engravable black and white images.

Whether you are using your laser for fun or profit you want to be able to create quility unique items. You may want to create simple engravings or complex boxes, trays or text. Laser Photo Wizard Pro can help you get the most out of your laser engraver. First of all it solves many of the issues that plague photo engraving.
The product has 5 engraving methods and 3 dithering methods to accommodate the quality of the laser and the type of material being engraved. When engraving, especial on wood, image contrast can be lost. Special algorithms have been added to increase contrast.

The program also supports overlays, extensive text, decorative frames and cutting frames. It also can add small images to the main image that can be added as an image or vectors. An Editor is supplied to make small changes to the output.

Laser engraving photos is only half the story. You may want to create gift items or items to sell. Laser Photo Wizard supports generators that can create boxes, trays, connected text or birdhouses all that create sellable items.


We recommend you try the FREE DEMO to convince yourself that Laser Photo Wizard Pro truly is fun to use and creates amazing output.

Buy it now, for only $49.95 you will receive a license that can be used for 4 Windows computers   

Have Fun, Make Money with Laser Photo Wizard

Fun for your family: Put their images on wood or stone.

Create Plaques: Take your favored bible verse or saying and combine it with an image to create Plaques to give as gifts or sell.

Another Way to Showcase your Photography: Now days everyone has a cell phone camera so it is hard to impress people with just a photo. Laser Engrave that photo and suddenly you have a unique offering.

Enhance Woodworking Projects: Add a strip of flowers or a design to the edge of your next wooden box.

Create Custom Objects: Use the generators to create Boxes, Trays, Connected Text and Birdhouses

The uses for this program are limited only by your imagination.

Why Buy Laser Photo Wizard?

  • Intuitive Interface easily get results fast
  • Supports 5 Engraving Methods
  • Can use any jpeg as a source photo
  • Built in Box, Connected Text & Birdhouse Generator
  • Can create custom output sizes and resolution
  • The Overlay feature lets you create elaborate frames
  • 3D Gray Output
  • Constantly under development with free updates to purchased version
  • Four preview Modes
  • Offers built in printing
  • Brightness, color, and rotation adjustments are available
  • The built in Editor lets you fix your images on the spot!
  • Extensive labeling is now part of the Software
Simple User Interface

Laser Photo Wizard offers a simple, intuitive user interface that makes it easy to learn, easy to use, and fun for all ages and skill levels.

The Graphical User Interface
Laser Engraving Photo Woman
It does not matter how powerful a software product is if the interface is so hard to use that the average person cannot easily and quickly get results. The Wizard uses icons, sliders and buttons combined into a simple workflow. At its most basic simply click Load Image to choose you image and then choose your effect with the touch of a radio button. Need to make changes? Click on the Adjustments Icon to do color matching, scale or rotate the image settings. Want some text or an overlay then select the Effects Icon.

Laser Engraving Methods



We feel that the most important thing in a Laser Engraving software package is image preparation. It is not an easy task to convert an image to a series of black and white pixels. Laser Photo Wizard has black and white and five photo conversion methods.

Black and White

This method creates a black and white gray scaled image. It cannot be engraved because it contains gray pixels. You can use it to adjust the black and white color settings.
laser engraving software
Sketch Effect

Sketch will attempt to look at edges and create a solid sketch of the image. This is very helpful because it is not only artistic, but lower cost lasers that do not control their power and position as well still can do a nice rendering on most materials.
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Sketch Effect Smooth

Sketch Smooth will smooth the edges and give a styalize look to the engraving.
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Sketch With Dither

Sketch with Dither combines the sketch output with a dithered photo.
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Dithered Gray

Dithered Gray creates a easly engravable image that has good contrast but is not as hard to engrave as a dithered photo. It is the default engraving method.
laser engraving software
Dithered Photo

Dithered Photo creates the most detailed output. It requires careful power setting on your laser engraver. It should only be used on hardwoods like maple or alder or other materials that have good contrast and minamal burning.
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Dithering Methods

A laser engraver normaly can burn or not burn a surface so an image has to be black or white it cannot be gray. The conversion of a gray scale image to black and white is called dithering. Laser Photo Wizard offers 3 dithering methods.


Floyd-Steinberg Dithering

Floyd-Steinberg is a dithering algorithm. Dithering is converting a grayscale image to black and white no gray, such that the density of black dots in the new image approximates the average grey level in the original.

If you look at a close up of this method you can see how smooth the output is. The problem is that fine details are lost.
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Colby Dithering Effect

The Colby dithering algorithm was developed for this product by the author, Ken Colby. Like Floyd-Steinberg it tries to make the density of black dots in the new image approximate the average grey level in the original. Unlike Floyd-Steinberg it considers the original image and tries to arrange the dots so that they tend to appear near the darker areas. This creates a image with higher contrast but it is less smooth then the Floyd-Steinberg. It should always be used if you are outputting landscapes or products but with people it is personal choice.
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Colby Dot Migration


The Colby dithering algorithm works well for details but it does not give smooth results like Floyd-Steinberg. Colby Dot Migration starts with Floyd-Steinberg Dithering but then it uses a proprietary algorithm to move the dots to increase local contrast. It can be very effective but it can also create artifacts so a slider is provided in the advanced settings section to let you select how much of the effect your want.
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Smart Contrast

The problem with laser photo engraving is that most photos are of such low contrast that they do not engrave well. Colby dithering helps to fix that. Colby Sketch does fix it but the results do not always look photo realistic. Smart contrast looks at edges and surrounding areas to compute contrast. This technique has 2 parts, level and radius. The level setting determines how strong the effect, the radius setting will determine how wide an area is considered for the background. You can set these factors with sliders in advanced settings or you can simply use the radio buttons to set the sliders for you.
Radio Buttons (the defult)

Laser Engraving Control
No Contrast, Mild, Strong and Very Strong
Laser Engraving Control Laser Engraving Control Laser Engraving Control Laser Engraving Control
3D Gray

3D Gray takes a PNG file with a transparent background and creates a 3D like engraving. How it works is anyplace that is transparent is changed to black, the highest engraving value. Any place that is not transparent is dithered using the selected dithering algorithm. You can select the gray level for the dithered image. Selecting a low number will make it look like the image is a raised cutout. Selecting a high number will make it look like an engraved image. Selecting a min range number like 100 will give a 3D like appearance to the output. To do 3D Gray, Check the 3D Gray Box an select a dithering method. Laser Engraving Photo Woman Laser Engraving Photo Woman

Click here to for a step by step guide to 3D Gray.

Display Modes

The display modes help you see how the output image will look when engraved. These setting do not affect the output only how it is shown on the screen. The software offers 4 display modes:

Dots Mode

This mode shows the actual pixel of the image that is closest to the display pixel. The problem is that the output pixels do not match the display pixels so you get what looks like a mess of dots.

You can zoom in on the image and the dots will make more sense.
laser engraving software
Gray Mode

With Gray mode the display pixel is the sum of the nearby output pixels. This makes the image look closer to the final output image.
laser engraving software
Photo Mode

This is the same a gray mode but the white background is replaced with an image. You can select your background image in the settings area.
laser engraving software
Photo Mode Inverted

This inverts the gray mode and is used to show how something might look on a dark background like granite. To use this make sure you pick a dark background photo.
laser engraving software
Of course if you are going to output a photo on a dark substance you should use one with a dark background. See the Support section on how to use Green Screen Wizard to do this.
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Laser Photo Wizard Features

Compare Images

With only a simple file open it is difficult to find a photo to process. Many photographers used a separate program to review the images and then used the Wizard to process the selected image. This will no longer be necessary with the Compare Image feature. This feature will create large thumbnail images for you to look at. You can drag any image to one of 4 review windows so that you can compare even larger images. You can double click on the thumbnail or the image in the compare window and it will be loaded as the image to process. This features takes a few minutes to create the thumbnails but it is worth the wait.
laser engraving software

laser engraving software
Airbrush Editor

The Pro Studio Version of Laser Photo Wizard has a custom version of Green Screen Wizards Airbrush Editor that makes it easy to edit black and white photos. It works best cleaning up sketch mode photos. The dithered photos are difficult to edit because the pattern of dots is easily disturbed. You can use the copy mode for these images and you can clear a background for text for dithered images.
Photo editor
Photo editor
Skin Smoothing

In Green Screen Wizard Skin Smoothing helps to remove blemishes and wrinkels and give the skin a glow. What skin smoothing adds in the Laser Photo Wizard is the ability to apply white makeup that makes faces lighter for a more pleasant output.
Photo editor Photo editor
Adding Frames

The Laser Photo Wizard has an powerful framing system. It lets you apply an inner frame and an outer frame. If the outer frame is white then it can make the image look like it is floating. You can choose Square , Oval, Heart or Jagged Frames. The frame can be solid or you can load an image. The frames are added before the effect so that they will be dithered or sketched depending on the effect selected.

In version 4 you can now use the framing system to vector cut the output. This makes it very easy to create plaques on thin materials.

Sample that uses frame to cut output.
Laser Engraving Photo
Photo editor Photo editor Photo editor
Lighting Effects

Lighting Effects let you emphasize areas of the photo, or create side lighting. The example shows first the girl with no lighting then the butterfly lightened by the circle lighting effect. The second photo shows sheet lighting, used best on close up portraits
Photo editor Photo editor
Connecting Grid

Often you would like to output letter and images to a Laser Engraver that are not connected. The connection grid option makes it easy to do this. It is great for creating paper greeting cards or window art.
Laser Engraving Photo Eagle
Add Unlimited Text or Images
Laser Photo Wizard gives you full flexibility to add annotation or images to your output. With the image feature add logos, banners, or transparent png files to a photo for engraving.
Color and Exposure Control

The Wizard gives your control of brightness, contrast and saturation as well as independent control of the red ,green and blue balance. You can use these controls to correct poorly exposed images or images with bad color balance. They can also be use to fine tune the black and white conversion.
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Scale, Placement and Rotate

Scale, Placement and Rotate It is important to fit the foreground to the background. The Wizard give you control of the scale, placement and rotation of the images.
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Overlays

Overlays are png files with a transparent section. They can be used to create elaborate frames for your work as well as add text to the image. Often the image has to be moved and scaled to fit it the opening. You can create your own overlays with Photoshop.
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Simple Labels

In the full version you can put 2 labels at 9 preselected positions. The labels can be Xlarge, Large, Med, or Small. You can have them in white or black in the Times Roman, Arial or Cursive font.
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Generators

Generators are programs that generate files that can be used by a laser engraver use to create items. They are accessed by clicking on the Generator icon in the top bar.

So far we have 3 generators.
laser engraving software

The Box Generator: this generator generates the sides of a box or tray.
The Birdhouse Generator: this generator generates the sides and top of a bird house.
Connected Text Generator this generated generates connected text and an outline to cut it out.

Box Generator

Create any kind of box or tray using our powerful Box Generator. These boxes make great gifts when the box is personalized with a photo or text.
Click here for more information about the Box Generator.
Laser Photo Wizard Box Generator
Birdhouse Generator

The Box Generator proved to be a very useful and fun option. It was decieded to add other generators. The first one was a birdhouse generator. This generator can create 3 different kinds of birdhouses, Traditional, Flat Roof and Tapered Bottom.
Click here for more information about the Birdhouse Generator.
Laser Photo Wizard Birdhouse Generator Laser Photo Wizard Birdhouse Generator Laser Photo Wizard Birdhouse Generator
Connected Text Generator

People love seeing fancy text, especially their own name. This feature makes it easy to make dramatic text signs. The connected text options is just what it sounds like, this generator will create text that is connect to a base or connected to itself. You can select the font and the size and other options. This generator will create an output image to be engraved and a black image that can be vectorized for cutting the image out. The basic styles that can be created are:

Click here for more information about the Connected Text Generator.

Some Examples
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