What you're making
Subsurface laser engraving (SSLE) fires a laser into a clear glass blank and creates thousands of tiny fractures inside it. Each fracture is one dot, and together those dots form a portrait, logo, or 3D scene suspended in the glass. To engrave one, the machine needs a point cloud file — usually PLY — describing exactly where to fire each dot.
LaserTools turns a single photo into that file. You edit the image, generate a 3D mesh from it, drop the mesh into a virtual crystal that matches your physical blank, then export. Everything runs in the browser, and nothing leaves your machine until you upload to your engraver.
From photo to file
Start in Photo Studio. Open a clean, well-lit head-and-shoulders shot, ideally turned slightly off-axis so the depth model has something to work with. If the photo is small, run Upscale first, since more pixels means more detail in the dots. Background removal is optional but strongly recommended, and it should be your last step: any background pixels that survive will end up as stray dots floating around the subject in the final crystal. It goes last on purpose, because running a PHOTON edit (the default model) after it can bring the background back, while the more advanced WAVELENGTH model does not. When the cutout is clean, click Send to Mesh Studio.
In Mesh Studio, click Generate. The depth model produces a 3D mesh in the preview. Orbit it and check the face. The nose should sit forward, the eyes slightly recessed, the jawline curving back. Look for a halo of stray geometry around the edges; a halo means the background was not fully removed, so jump back to Photo Studio and rerun it. Once the mesh looks right, hit Send to Crystal Studio.
Crystal Studio takes the hand-off by itself: it imports the mesh, fits it to the crystal, converts it, and lands you on the crystal preview. From there you adjust. On the Crystal tab pick the shape (Box for awards, Heart for memorial pieces, and there is also Cylinder, Sphere, Dome and Diamond), choose the size preset that matches your blank or type the dimensions in millimetres, and set the margins you want kept clear around the image.
Then open the Convert tab. Leave the method on Portrait layers, set Best viewing direction to the face people will actually look at, and use XY Step and Z Step to trade detail against engraving time — smaller steps mean more dots, finer detail and a longer job. Press Convert to Point Cloud (or Update Point Cloud after a change) and check the result on the Crystal preview, which renders it as lit glass rather than as a cloud of dots. That is the honest look at what you are about to burn.
When it looks right, Export. PLY is what most crystal engravers expect; PCD, XYZ, DXF, GLB and STL are there for the few that do not. Coordinates are in millimetres and match the crystal size you set, so the file should drop straight into your machine's software. There are also two highly experimental straight-to-machine formats — xTool (.xs) and LaserControl (.lpc) — that write a whole job rather than raw geometry; test either on scrap before committing a finished blank.
Getting professional results
Background removal is the single biggest factor between a clean engraving and a speckled one. After that, watch for two issues. The first is stray points outside the crystal boundary; the Crystal and Margins switches on the Crystal tab draw the wireframe and the margin guides, and anything outside them will hit the surface and can crack the glass. The second is density mismatches, which you control with XY Step: too coarse in a large blank looks empty, too fine in a small one mostly wastes laser time. If you are working to a deadline, Time-constrained engraving under Advanced options will set the spacing for you — give it a time limit and it tunes the step to the finest setting that still fits.
Always run a quick test engrave at low density before committing to a real blank. It catches orientation mistakes and depth problems at the cost of a few minutes of machine time, which is much cheaper than scrapping a finished crystal.