A DXF your laser will actually cut
A laser does not cut pictures. It drives a head along a path and switches the beam on, so two things must be true of that path: it has to close, and it has to be at the size the material was bought for. A raster image promises neither. What comes back from here is a DXF R2010 (AC1024) drawing of closed contours — LWPOLYLINE for the straight runs, degree-3 SPLINE for the curves — opened directly by AutoCAD 2010 and later, Fusion 360, LightBurn, Inkscape and FreeCAD.
Colour is the lever that matters most here: it is how cutting is kept apart from burning. Every colour the tracer keeps becomes a layer of its own, named FILL_ followed by that colour's hex digits — and layers are what laser software hangs its operations off. In LightBurn each arrives as a separate entry you point at a line cut or a fill; RDWorks assigns speed and power per layer.
Scale is the other half, and where first attempts used to end up in the offcuts bin. The header now declares the unit itself — $INSUNITS = 4, millimetres — and the geometry inside is written at that scale, so an importer that reads the header stops falling back on its own habit and landing the part 25.4 times too large. Type the finished width and height into the millimetre fields as well: they reach the DXF writer, so a 120 mm badge is written 120 mm across.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Upload the artwork as PNG, JPEG or WEBP — one image per conversion, and flat colour traces far cleaner than a photograph.
- Set Colours to 2 for a straight cut-out, or 3 to 4 when the job needs an engrave layer alongside the cut layer.
- Tick DXF, leave Shape stacking on Cut-outs, and type the finished width and height into the millimetre fields.
- Read the preview, then sign in with Google (free) to download the DXF.
- Import it — the header already says millimetres — then point each FILL_ layer at a cut or an engrave operation and add your kerf offset there.
Who this is for
The person who needs this is at a diode or CO2 machine with 3 mm acrylic already on the bed and artwork that turned up as a bitmap: a customer's logo, a badge exported flat from a drawing app, a photographed paper template.
Three things account for most of the wasted sheet. The part comes out at the wrong scale, because no finished size was ever typed and the drawing was left to follow the traced pixel grid. The same edge gets cut twice a fraction of a millimetre apart, because a soft anti-aliased boundary was traced as a band with two sides. Or something meant to be shaded lands on the cutting layer and the head goes straight through it.
Worth saying flatly: these contours are measured off pixels by a geometric tracer — colour segmentation, an explicit anti-aliasing model, then curve fitting — and beam width is compensated nowhere in them. Kerf belongs in your laser software, where it changes with material and focus.
Settings we suggest
Colours: 2 for a plain cut-out, 3 or 4 when a cut and an engrave have to come back separated. One colour in, one layer out. The slider goes to 64, but any colour beyond what the artwork genuinely contains gets spent on the soft rim of a shape, splitting it into a thin band with two edges: the doubled cut line.
Shape stacking: Cut-outs. Holes arrive as their own closed loops inside the boundary around them, so the middle of a letter O drops away and the letter survives. Stacked overlaps shapes along shared edges, and a laser will cheerfully follow a shared edge twice. Draw style and grouping never reach the DXF writer.
Fill in both millimetre boxes. What you type is applied to the DXF and is the only dependable way to fix physical dimensions, since images above 1.5 megapixels are reduced before tracing: left empty, the drawing is scaled from that reduced grid at 96 px = 25.4 mm. Either way the header goes out saying millimetres, so the import dialog is not left guessing. Uploads go up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels.
Questions
How do I keep cutting and engraving on separate layers?
Decide it in the artwork, with colour. Everything to be cut goes in one flat colour and everything to be burned in another, then trace with a matching colour count. Each colour becomes a layer named FILL_ plus the hex value, and layers survive the import, so you assign a line cut to one and a fill to the other.
The drawing came in at the wrong size. What do I change?
Start with the millimetre fields here: type the finished width and height and the geometry is built to them. Left empty, they hand the drawing the pixel grid instead, at 96 px = 25.4 mm. The file states its unit as well — $INSUNITS = 4, millimetres — so an importer that reads the header lands the part at size. If yours has been told to ignore the header and assume inches it will still multiply everything by 25.4, and that setting is where you fix it.
Is the kerf already compensated?
No. You get the boundary exactly as traced, so a part cut on that line finishes smaller by half a beam width all round, and a hole larger. Put the offset in your laser software, where it can be measured and re-measured, because the figure moves with material, thickness, focus and power.
Why is nothing filled in the file?
The writer emits boundaries only: LWPOLYLINE runs, degree-3 SPLINE curves, no HATCH anywhere and no embedded bitmap. For a laser that is the right shape of file, since fill engraving is generated by the machine software out of a closed outline — hand it the loop and switch that layer to fill.
The head traced my outline but the part never dropped out.
Every contour written is a closed loop, so suspect the layer assignment before the geometry — a layer set to score or engrave follows the same path without going through. The other usual cause is artwork drawn as thin strokes, which trace as narrow two-edged ribbons.
What are the limits, and what does it cost?
One image per conversion, as PNG, JPEG or WEBP, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. In our local measurements a flat badge takes 3–12 seconds; fine-line or noisy artwork takes longer, and a conversion still going at 60 seconds stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image. Free and watermark-free; a free Google sign-in releases the download. Before signing in you get 10 conversions per hour, signed in 60 per hour and 300 per day. Download links expire after 1 hour, and files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.