With your Mr Beam you can engrave the backside of a mirror! In this tutorial we will show you how to set up your picture file, before starting with engraving. 

You can also find laser-friendly mirror tiles in our material store. 


Tip: If you only need small picture adjustments you can also do this directly in the Mr Beam software!

1. For the engraving in this tutorial we have used  laser-friendly mirror tiles while are also available from our material store. 


2. Open a picture editing program of your choice. For this tutorial we will be using Gimp, which you can download for free and which is available for all operating systems.  


Drag-and-drop a picture of your choice into your working area. Alternatively, use the menu to navigate to File > Open and upload your picture. The photograph in our example is from Unsplash.


3. Let's begin with adjustments of the picture. In the menu above click on Picture > Mode > Indexed... 


4. In the colour table choose black/white pallet, and under Dithering > Colour Dithering choose Positioned. Then click on Convert. 



This is how our edited picture file looks now: 



5. Save your file under File > Export as... We have saved our picture as a PNG. It does not matter, which bitmap file format you are going to choose - a JPG would work just as well.



6. If you are working with text in your laser design, you should mirror it in your file! In Gimp you can do this by clicking on Image > Transformation > Flip Horizontally. Because it is only possible to engrave the backside of the mirror, you should mirror the text in the program, so that later, after your engraving job is done, it is displayed correctly when looking at the front side of the mirror. 


7. Upload your file to the Mr Beam Software. Choose Mirror in the material settings. Go through default settings for engraving, click on advanced settings, and adjust line distance to 0,1mm and switch Engraving time optimization mode to Basic. Also, click on Dithering, as we are dealing with a photo engraving here. 


Please note: Every picture is different and every material reacts differently. It is possible that the laser parameter setting from are example won't work for your design 100%. We recommend to always start with testing a small version of your design on a spare piece of material, to gain quick insights whether the settings are working well for you.  

These material settings are only suitable for Mr Beam II dreamcut model.



8. Our laser job is finished after approx. 4 hours. In the end you can clean your tile with a glas cleaner and a sponge. 

Finished!