A browser Photoshop alternative for engravers
Photoshop is the most powerful image editor ever made. It's also expensive, heavyweight, and aimed at graphic designers — not laser engravers. LaserTools focuses on the small set of operations engravers actually need, does them with AI, and runs in the browser. If Photoshop is a Swiss army knife, LaserTools is a tool roll built for one trade.
| Feature | LaserTools | Adobe Photoshop |
|---|---|---|
| Background removal | One-click AI | Manual masking or Select Subject |
| Image upscaling | AI 2× | Preserve Details / Super Resolution |
| Prompt-based edits | PHOTON / WAVELENGTH | Generative Fill (subscription tier) |
| Depth-map generation | AI (emBOSS v1.0) | Manual, via gradients |
| 3D mesh from photo | Yes — Mesh Studio | No |
| Point-cloud editing | Yes — Crystal Studio | No |
| Runs in | Browser (any OS) | Desktop (Windows / macOS) |
| Pricing | Credit-metered + free tier | Monthly subscription |
| Built for | Laser engravers | Graphic designers, photographers |
Which one earns the job
Keep Photoshop for what it is unbeatable at: layered composites, precise masking, typography, colour-managed print work, and batch actions across hundreds of files. If you are already fluent in it, your existing prep routine is not worth abandoning. Come here when the job is one photograph headed for a machine. Photo Studio is deliberately small, offering Adjust, Levels, Transform, crop, background removal and prompt-based editing, because that is the short list an engraving actually needs and a short list is faster to work through than a deep one. The clearer reason to switch is the second half of the workflow. A bas-relief height map from a photograph, a 2.5D or 3D mesh, a point cloud arranged inside a crystal blank: those are outputs a general image editor is not built to produce, and they are the ones your machine wants. Note the trade in the other direction. There are no layers and no masks here, so genuinely compositional work still belongs in Photoshop.
Fitting it around a Photoshop habit
Nothing has to be replaced at once. The usual pattern is to keep Photoshop for anything compositional and hand the single-photo, single-outcome jobs to Photo Studio. Files move as ordinary images. Export a JPG, PNG or WebP from Photoshop and drop, browse or paste it in, then export a PNG back out when you are done. If you would rather finish in Photoshop, that works too: bring the image over only for the steps that produce 3D output. Those outputs leave as PNG, as an 8-bit PNG height map from Embossing Studio, as GLB, OBJ, STL, PLY or DXF from Mesh Studio, or as a PLY, PCD, XYZ or DXF point cloud from Crystal Studio. Projects auto-save to your account rather than to a local file, so there is no working document to keep in sync; open the browser on whichever machine is free and the work is there.
The takeaway
Photoshop will do more across more disciplines. LaserTools does the engraver-specific subset faster, cheaper, in the browser, and with AI baked into every step.