Man I love the internet sometimes! I’m always amazed just how much information can be gleaned from one single photo/screenshot.
Let’s see… the second step, marked “engrave”, has the option “engrave by shade” chosen. Underneath that, there are four colors (“shades”) and the rightmost one, ~black, seems to be highlighted/selected. Below that are three radio buttons, and “both” has been chosen.
Looking at the coaster, the bird and its outline match that black color. That makes sense since it would probably be optimal to engrave the filled bird area as a raster and the thin outline as a vector.
OK, speculation time… (sorry if I get some things COMPLETELY wrong… I’ve never even seen a laser cutter in person)
I’m thinking the user will be able to click on each color in the list, and make a selection from the radio buttons below. In other words, in the screenshot ~black is selected and its corresponding engrave-type, both, has been selected, if the leftmost color, which I’ll call dark brown, was clicked on, the radio button might change to “raster”.
If my speculation is close to reality, I’m thinking it might be beneficial to have an icon or marker of some kind attached to each color/“shade” to signify which type of engraving is being employed. So in my speculative example, it seems like it could be helpful if the “dark brown” box had a little “raster” icon in it; like a little grid pattern icon or an “R” or something.
Better yet, a column of three radio buttons arranged below each color would be nice (top button = raster, middle button = vector, and the bottom = both). This would remove the need to click on the color before being able to modify the option, saving… maybe one whole entire second! I could also see this column of radio buttons making user-error slightly less probable. Lastly, it would give the user an “at a glance” idea of what is going to happen after clicking the “Zap” button.
Oh, seems like there should be a “neither” option as well, for colors the user wishes to skip.
With this particular image I’m having trouble differentiating between the colors. Perhaps the software could have an “enhance” option that would change the colors in the preview workarea and in the UI so they’re unmistakably different. So, the color I think looks black would be changed to red, the “dark brown” would be changed to blue, the darker brown would become green, and the darkest brown would become cyan. “Enhancing” the image would make it look less pretty, but it seems like it could be very helpful. For instance, it looks like the dots are… “dark brown”… maybe… and they seem to have a little “darker brown” highlights, and I’m guessing the outer outline is “darkest brown”. I’d hate for my inability to distinguish between the darker and darkest browns to translate into selecting raster for the outline and vector for the highlights in the dots.
Further, the raster lines could be differentiated in some way. Perhaps they could be animated with a moving dashed line, similar to they way the boundaries of selected areas are shown in image editors.