Discussion: How to Prepare Photos for Laser Engraving with GIMP: Dithering, Halftones, and Grayscale

This is a solid GIMP workflow. For anyone who wants the same basic prep without installing GIMP, I built a free browser tool here: https://makersarmy.com/tools/image-preparation. It covers greyscale, tonal and local contrast, inversion, threshold and Floyd–Steinberg or Atkinson dithering. It doesn’t crop or remove backgrounds, so GIMP still wins when you need those. Either way, set the final size before dithering and test a small section on the real material.