By Graham K. Rogers

There is an old joke, that may be lost on some these days, about a man asking his date the the evening, "Why don't you come up and see my etchings?" Check for the phrase on Google. Being aware of the invitation and its implications -- and knowing of the Art form -- I was interested to see a new app with the name, Etchings. I was also delighted by the icon.

The joke about the etchings conceals the delicate nature of the art form and the creation of a work. Each one is created by the application of acid on a metal plate (usually copper), removing just enough of the metal to allow ink to be applied and a print made on paper. Japanese woodblock prints have a similar removal of the right amount of the original, although that process uses several plates. Examples of etchings have been created by William Blake, Rembrandt and Lucian Freud. There are many others.

Etchings

The opening screen offers a choice between camera (at the top) and the photo library. In a similar way to many other photography apps, once a shot is taken with the camera, there is a Use button. Cancelling allows a photograph to be taken again. With images already stored on the iPhone, selecting one makes it available for use in the same way as taking a photograph.

Once the image is chosen, a user is asked to crop. A square image format is used -- again common in many apps -- and the image can be enlarged with the two-finger pinch.

When this part of the editing process is complete, the "etching" effect is applied and the image is rendered. Below the finished image are two buttons: FX (etching) and levels. The first of these allows the use of 8 different types of etching effect: some monochrome, some colour. One of these produces an effect like a postage stamp and another (Franklin) like a dollar bill.

The levels button allows a number of different intensities to be applied to the selected effect, from Thin to Heavy: a super-bold effect.

At the top of the editing panel are two controls. To the left is a red cross: cancel, which takes us back to the start screen. No more work can be done on the image. On the start screen, as well as the input selectors, is an "i" for information which reveals buttons for following the developers (Twitter, Facebook) and connections to Instagram.

A green check-mark to the right of that editing page reveals a number of export options: Save to Camera Roll, Share -- Twitter or Facebook -- Send email, or Open in, which gave me 15 or so apps that now handle this.

All of the images I saved to the camera roll were 1200 x 1200 pixels, with a files size of around 700 - 850 KB. One I took with the rear-facing camera was the same resolution but 1.18 MB. Sending images by email brought up a number of options: small, medium, large. With one image these were 59.4 KB, 205 KB and 824 KB respectively.

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Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.