You can change the speed and power settings of the laser so that instead of cutting all the way through your material it etches your design into the surface.

On some materials (such as wood) it is possible to create lighter and darker etch lines by varying the speed and power settings for different parts of your design. For some designs, such as very small text, it may be more suitable to raster engrave your design.

Raster engraving is when the laser head engraves by moving from left to right slowly down the material (like an injet printer). This can involve either filling in vector objects or engraving image files like jpegs.

Photographic images should be given a bitmap (halftone) so that they maintain tonal gradients when engraved.