Standard propellant and detonation tests typically performed to characterize the performance of energetic materials require large quantities of material (at least tens of grams) and can be expensive and time-consuming. This work introduces a method for characterizing the deflagration of energetic materials in a laboratory setting, using only 15-20mg of energetic material. Temperature, energy release and emission signatures were measured and analyzed for the laser-induced deflagration of 8 different conventional military explosives. Graphite nanoparticles and micron-sized aluminum powder were added to the explosive compositions to investigate their effect on the emission signatures. A high-speed color camera recorded the deflagration events and was utilized as a full-color pyrometer to calculate the average temperatures and image hotspots; the temperatures maps were compared to those measured by conventional two-color pyrometry. The laboratory-scale method presented here can be applied to novel energetic materials under development that may be available only in limited quantities to evaluate their potential as propellants or reduced emission signature explosives prior to scale-up.