Workflows

Introduction

Every laser engraving job involves the same core challenge: turning a photograph into something a laser can reproduce. That means adjusting contrast, converting to grayscale, perhaps inverting for dark materials, sizing the image to the workpiece, and finally dithering it into a pure black-and-white dot pattern. For a single image, doing this manually takes a few minutes. For ten images, it takes an hour. For a hundred images, it takes your entire day.

Workflows solve this problem. A workflow captures every editing step you perform - the exact tools, the exact settings, the exact order - and saves it as a reusable file. The next time you face the same type of job, you load the workflow and every step replays automatically. What took minutes now takes seconds. What took hours now takes minutes.

But workflows aren't just about speed. They're about consistency. When you process 50 customer photos for a wedding gift batch, every single image goes through the identical pipeline. No forgotten steps, no accidental settings changes, no variation between the first image and the fiftieth. The result is predictable, professional, and repeatable.

This tutorial covers the entire workflow lifecycle: creating them in the Advanced Mode editor, managing and fine-tuning the steps, saving and sharing them, loading them onto new images, and using the dedicated Run Workflow tool to batch-process entire production runs. Whether you're a hobbyist engraving gifts in your garage or a business shipping hundreds of custom products a week, workflows are the tool that turns ImagR from an image editor into a production system.

What Is a Workflow?

A workflow is a JSON file that records a sequence of image editing operations. Each operation - called a step - stores the plugin name and the exact parameter values used. Think of it as a recipe: the ingredients are your image editing tools, the quantities are your parameter settings, and the order is the sequence in which they're applied.

A typical workflow file might contain six steps: CLAHE for tonal enhancement, a contrast boost, monochrome conversion, invert, resize to target dimensions, and Floyd–Steinberg dithering. The JSON stores each step as an object with the operation name and every parameter - clip limit values, contrast percentages, target dimensions, DPI - down to the last decimal.

This precision is what makes workflows powerful. When you replay a workflow on a different image, the result isn't "roughly similar" - it's mathematically identical in processing. The only variable is the source image itself.

Where Workflows Come From

• Advanced Mode Editor - Every tool you apply is automatically recorded as a step. When you're happy with the result, save the workflow as a JSON file. This is how most workflows are born - through hands-on experimentation with a real image.
• Workflow Store - Browse and download professionally tuned workflows built for specific materials and use cases. These have been tested across dozens of images and laser setups, so they're an excellent starting point - especially for materials you haven't worked with before.
• Community & Colleagues - Workflow files are plain JSON. Email them, post them in forums, drop them in a shared Dropbox folder, or check them into version control alongside your project files. If someone on your team dialed in the perfect settings for anodized aluminum, everyone can use that workflow within seconds.

Real-World Use Cases

Workflows aren't an abstract concept - they solve real problems that laser engravers face every day. Here are concrete scenarios where workflows transform the way you work.

The Hobbyist: Personalized Gifts

You engrave cutting boards and wooden coasters as gifts for friends and family. Every time, you find yourself repeating the same steps: boost contrast, convert to grayscale, invert for dark wood, resize to 4×4 inches, dither. With a saved workflow, you drop in the photo, hit Process, and download the laser-ready file in seconds. You've built up a small collection: one for dark walnut, one for light maple, one for bamboo. Each is tuned to how your specific laser interacts with that material.

The Side Business: Custom Pet Portraits

You sell custom pet portrait engravings on Etsy. Every week, 10–20 customers send you photos of their dogs, cats, and occasionally a parrot. The photos vary wildly - some are professional studio shots, others are blurry phone snapshots taken in dim living rooms. Your workflow handles all of them: CLAHE pulls detail out of the dark photos, contrast normalization brings them into a consistent tonal range, and your carefully tuned dithering settings produce beautiful results on slate every time. What used to be an hour of per-image tweaking is now a 5-minute batch job.

The Production Shop: Wedding Photo Packages

A customer walks in with 48 wedding photos and wants them engraved on wooden plaques as party favors. Without workflows, this is a multi-day project - each image needs individual attention. With Run Workflow's batch mode, you load all 48 images, select your "birch-plaque-photo" workflow, set the output dimensions to match your plaque size, and hit Process. Twenty minutes later, you download a ZIP with 48 laser-ready files. The entire job goes from days to a single afternoon, including engraving time.

The CNC Shop: Material Consistency

Your shop engraves on six different materials: hardwood, softwood, acrylic, anodized aluminum, slate, and leather. Each material reacts differently to the laser - what looks perfect on maple produces a muddy mess on slate. You maintain six workflows, each fine-tuned through weeks of test engravings. When a new order comes in, your operator doesn't need to know the optimal CLAHE clip limit for black granite or the ideal contrast curve for vegetable-tanned leather. They just pick the right workflow. This turns specialized knowledge into repeatable process.

The Team: Standardized Quality

You run a team of three operators. Before workflows, quality varied depending on who processed the image. Mike liked high contrast; Sarah preferred softer tones; the intern was still learning. Now, every operator uses the same approved workflows. The customer gets identical quality regardless of who's on shift. New hires become productive on day one - they don't need to learn image processing, just how to load a workflow and hit Process.

The Experimenter: A/B Testing Materials

You're trying a new material - cork tiles - and need to figure out the right settings. You create a test workflow, engrave a sample, adjust parameters, save as a new version. After five iterations, you have "cork-v5.json" that produces great results. The earlier versions are still on disk if you need to reference them. Workflows turn trial-and-error into a documented, version-controlled process. You can even share your final cork workflow in the Workflow Store so others don't have to repeat your experiments.

The E-Commerce Seller: Product Photo Processing

You sell engraved products online and need listing photos that show exactly what the customer will receive. For each new design, you process it through the same workflow you'll use for production, take a photo of the actual engraving, and use that as your listing image. This guarantees your product photos match your actual output - because the processing pipeline is literally identical.

Creating a Workflow

Workflows are born in the Advanced Mode editor. There's no separate "workflow builder" - you simply edit an image, and every tool you apply becomes a step. The best workflows come from working with a representative sample image: one that's typical of the images you'll be processing later.

The Recording Process

Open any image in the Advanced Mode editor and start working. Every time you click Apply on a tool, that operation is recorded as a workflow step - including every parameter value from the dialog. You can apply as many tools as you want, in any order. Undo a step? It's removed from the workflow. Re-apply with different settings? The new values replace the old ones.

Choosing a Good Test Image

The image you use during workflow creation matters. Pick one that represents the average quality you'll encounter in production - not the best photo, not the worst, but something typical. If you're building a workflow for customer portrait engravings, choose a photo with average lighting, average resolution, and average contrast. This ensures your settings work well across the range of images you'll actually receive.

Recommended Step Order

For laser engraving workflows, the following order produces the most reliable results:

1. Tonal corrections - brightness, contrast, CLAHE, dehaze. Work with the full color data first.
2. Color-to-grayscale conversion - Monochrome or Grayscale, once tones are dialed in.
3. Invert - if your material requires it (dark materials where the laser removes surface coating).
4. Resize - set the final output dimensions and DPI. This must come right before dithering.
5. Dither - always the very last editing step. Dithering at the final resolution ensures the dot pattern maps pixel-for-pixel to the laser's output grid.

Managing Steps

Once you've applied a few tools, you can inspect and modify your workflow at any time. Open ImagR → Show Current Workflow to see every step listed in order with its parameters.

Viewing the Step List

The workflow panel shows each step as a card: the plugin name, a summary of its key parameters, and controls for reordering, disabling, or removing the step. This gives you a complete bird's-eye view of your processing pipeline at a glance.

Reordering Steps

Drag any step card to a new position. The image re-processes through the new order in real time, so you can immediately see how the sequence affects the result. This is especially useful when experimenting - sometimes applying sharpening before grayscale conversion produces noticeably different results than applying it after.

Disabling Steps

Toggle a step off without removing it. The disabled step stays in the workflow but is skipped during processing. This is perfect for A/B comparisons - disable the contrast step, see the result, re-enable it, compare. Disabled steps are preserved when you save the workflow, so you can ship optional steps that recipients can enable if needed.

Editing Parameters

Click any step card to reopen its tool dialog with the current values pre-filled. Adjust the parameters, click Apply, and the step is updated in place - no need to delete and re-add it. The image updates immediately to reflect the change.

Saving & Sharing

Saving a Workflow

When you're happy with your result, go to ImagR → Save Workflow. The entire step sequence - every plugin, every parameter - is exported as a .json file and downloaded to your computer. That's it. The file is small (usually under 5 KB), portable, and human-readable.

Naming Conventions

Give your workflows descriptive names. A good workflow filename tells you the material, the use case, and optionally a version number at a glance:

• dark-walnut-portrait.json - Portraits on dark walnut.
• slate-pet-photo-v3.json - Pet photos on slate, third iteration.
• anodized-aluminum-logo-highres.json - Logo engravings on anodized aluminum at high DPI.
• bamboo-coaster-300dpi.json - Coaster-sized engravings on bamboo at 300 DPI.

Sharing Workflows

Workflow files are plain JSON - they work everywhere. Here are some ways teams use them:

• Shared drive or Dropbox - Keep a "Workflows" folder that your entire team has access to. Organize by material or customer. When someone improves a workflow, they replace the file and everyone gets the update.
• Version control (Git) - For teams that use Git, committing workflow files alongside project assets creates a complete audit trail. You can diff versions, roll back changes, and branch experiments.
• Email or chat - The files are tiny - just attach them. This works well for one-off sharing or when helping a customer troubleshoot their engraving settings.
• Workflow Store - Publish your workflow to the ImagR Workflow Store. Other users can discover, download, and rate it. This is the best way to share with the wider community.

Loading a Workflow

Loading a workflow replays every recorded step on a new image. There are two places where you can load workflows, each designed for a different situation.

In the Advanced Mode Editor

Open an image in the editor, then go to ImagR → Load Workflow and select your JSON file. Every step is applied automatically in sequence - you can watch the image transform in real time as each step executes. After loading, the steps appear in your workflow panel, so you can fine-tune individual parameters if this particular image needs a slight adjustment.

This is ideal when you want the workflow's result but might need to tweak one or two settings. Maybe this particular photo is darker than usual and needs an extra contrast push. Load the workflow, adjust the contrast step, and you're done - no need to redo the other five steps manually.

In the Run Workflow Tool

The Run Workflow page is designed for hands-off processing. Upload a workflow and one or more images, configure output settings, and click Process. There's no editor interface - the workflow runs as a black box and you get the finished result. This is the right choice when you trust the workflow and just need to push images through the pipeline.

The Run Workflow Tool

Run Workflow is ImagR's dedicated production tool. It's built for the moment when creative decisions are done and you just need to push images through the pipeline as efficiently as possible.

Interface

The page is organized top to bottom: a mode toggle (Single vs. Batch) at the top, two drop zones for your image(s) and workflow file, a step visualization showing the workflow as colored pills, and collapsible output settings for resize and dithering. Everything is laid out so you can configure and launch processing without scrolling back and forth.

Single Mode

Single mode processes one image. Upload an image, upload a workflow, optionally configure resize and dithering, and click Process. A progress bar shows each step as it executes. When done, you see the result and can download it as PNG. This mode is perfect for testing a workflow on a representative sample before committing to a full batch.

Step Visualization

When you load a workflow, its steps appear as colored pills. Each pill shows the plugin name. Steps that will be skipped during processing appear in red with a strikethrough and an ⓘ info icon you can click for an explanation. This gives you a clear picture of what will actually happen to your image before you hit Process.

Batch Processing

Batch mode is the production workhorse. Upload a workflow and as many images as you need, configure output settings once, and let the system process every image through the same pipeline. This is what turns a 48-photo wedding order from a two-day project into a 30-minute job.

How Batch Processing Works

Switch to Batch mode with the toggle at the top. The image drop zone now accepts multiple files - drag in a folder's worth of images, or click to multi-select. Each image appears as a thumbnail card in a grid. You can add more images at any time with the "Add More" button.

Click Process, and images are processed sequentially - one at a time, in order. Each card shows its own progress overlay with the current step name and a progress bar. Completed cards show a green checkmark; queued cards show a waiting state. This sequential approach ensures stable results without overloading your browser's memory.

Working with Large Batches

For very large batches (50+ images), consider splitting into sub-batches of 20–30. This keeps browser memory manageable and lets you verify intermediate results. If an issue appears - say, one image was accidentally included twice - you can catch it mid-run rather than after processing the entire set.

Output Settings

The Run Workflow tool provides two post-processing controls that apply after the workflow steps have completed: resize and dithering. These are independent of the workflow itself - they're output-stage settings that you configure per job.

Resize & DPI

The Resize Output section lets you specify exact physical dimensions (inches or millimeters) and DPI for your output. This is critical for laser engraving: your image must match the physical workpiece size and the resolution your laser expects. Enter width, height, and DPI - the pixel dimensions are calculated automatically. For example, 6" × 4" at 254 DPI produces a 1524 × 1016 pixel image.

Resize uses Lanczos resampling, which preserves quality when downscaling. For upscaling, there's a 30% limit - if your source image is too small for the target size, you'll see an "Image Too Small" warning. In that case, use the AI Upscaler on your source images first.

If you leave the resize fields empty, images keep their original dimensions after processing. This works when your workflow already includes a resize step, or when you plan to handle sizing in your laser software.

Dithering

The Dither Output checkbox controls whether Jarvis-Judice-Ninke dithering is applied as the absolute final step. This converts your processed grayscale image into pure black-and-white dots - the format most laser engravers expect.

• Enabled (default) - Best for most laser engraving on wood, acrylic, slate, and similar materials. The Jarvis algorithm produces natural-looking gradients with minimal banding.
• Disabled - Use this when your laser software handles its own dithering, when you need grayscale output for 3D/relief engraving, or when your workflow already includes a dithering step.

Skipped Steps

When you load a workflow into the Run Workflow tool, some steps may be automatically marked as skipped. These appear as red pills with a strikethrough and an ⓘ info icon. Click the icon to see why a specific step was skipped.

Why Steps Get Skipped

Certain operations don't make sense in an automated batch context - either because they have dedicated controls on the Run Workflow page, or because they require per-image decisions that can't be automated:

• Dithering steps - Controlled by the Dither Output checkbox instead. This ensures dithering always happens last (after resize) regardless of where it appeared in the original workflow.
• Resize steps - Controlled by the Resize Output section instead. Your production dimensions may differ from what was used during workflow creation.
• AI Upscale steps - Upscaling is image-specific - a small 640×480 source needs different treatment than a large 4000×3000 one. Use the AI Upscaler tool on individual images before batch processing.
• Background Removal steps - Results vary dramatically between images - a portrait with a clean background succeeds while a group photo in a park may fail. Use the Background Removal tool on each image individually beforehand.

Downloading Results

Single Mode

After processing, a Download button appears below the result image. The output is a PNG file. If you used the resize settings, the PNG includes embedded DPI metadata so your laser software reads the correct physical dimensions without manual configuration.

Batch Mode

Once all images have been processed, a "Download ZIP" button appears. The archive contains every processed image as a PNG file, named after its original filename. You can also download individual images by clicking their result cards - useful when you need to re-send just one file to the laser.

Step-by-Step Walkthrough

This walkthrough covers the complete lifecycle: creating a workflow from scratch, testing it, then using it to batch-process a real production order. Our scenario: preparing 12 customer portrait photos for laser engraving on dark walnut plaques.

Part 1: Build the Workflow

Part 2: Test the Workflow

Part 3: Batch Process the Order

Tips & Best Practices

1. Separate creative from production. Workflow creation is a creative process - take your time, experiment, iterate. Workflow execution is a production process - it should be fast, predictable, and boring. Keep these two phases distinct.
2. Build material-specific workflows. Don't create a single "universal" workflow. What works on dark walnut looks terrible on light bamboo. Maintain dedicated workflows for each material you work with. Name them clearly.
3. Leave resize and dither to Run Workflow. Consider omitting resize and dither from the workflow itself - let the Run Workflow tool's output settings handle them. This makes your workflow portable across different product sizes and DPI settings. The same "dark-walnut-portrait" workflow works for 4×4 coasters and 12×16 wall plaques.
4. Test on a second image. Always verify your workflow on an image you didn't use during creation. The test image tends to look perfect because you tuned the settings specifically for it. The real question is: does it generalize?
5. Version your workflows. When you improve a workflow, save it as a new version (v2, v3…). Keep old versions. If v3 produces artifacts on certain images, you can roll back to v2 immediately instead of re-creating from scratch.
6. Prepare images before batching. Remove backgrounds, crop to subject, and upscale low-resolution images individually before feeding them into a batch run. These per-image operations don't belong in a workflow - they require human judgment.
7. Match DPI to your laser. Check your laser's documentation for the recommended DPI. Common values: 254 DPI (10 dots/mm) for most CO2 lasers, 318 DPI for higher detail, 500+ DPI for fiber lasers on metal. Using the wrong DPI wastes resolution or creates oversized files.
8. Keep workflows lean. Every step adds processing time - and that time multiplies across a batch. If you applied five experimental steps during creation and only three actually improved the result, remove the other two before saving. A five-step workflow on 50 images saves significant time over an eight-step one.
9. Share what works. If you've dialed in great settings for a difficult material, publish your workflow to the Workflow Store or share it with the community. Laser engraving is a craft where everyone benefits from shared knowledge - and someone else's workflow for a material you haven't tried yet might save you hours of experimentation.
10. Document your workflows. Keep a simple spreadsheet or note listing each workflow, what material and use case it's for, the DPI it was tested at, and any quirks or limitations. When you have 20 workflows six months from now, this documentation will save you from trial-and-error to find the right one.