Tutorial – Etchings – Putting It Through Its Paces

My source image was taken this past summer at the Cincinnati Zoo…it’s the old Elephant House…a classic and gracious building….perfect for Etchings!

When you open Etchings, this pop-up menu will come up…from which I picked “Photos”.

Choosing the “Elephant House” pic from my camera roll, I moved it around the “Move and Scale” window…then clicked on “Use”.

Etchings will always use as a default the “Raven” fx filter so I always go through the full gamut of choices before settling on the one I want to use. In this example, I picked “Spectrum” (B) as I liked this filter treated the colors in my source image.

Moving next the line weight (A), I decided on “Bold” (B).

Next in the sequence is “Exposure” (A). Starting with Exposure #1 on the far left of the control strip, you can see how dark this has made my image. Not what I wanted!

In this screen shot, I picked Exposure #4, or the middle point. This one’s not bad, but I like to “bracket” and check the other exposures out before settling.

Using Exposure #6, I decided that I liked this setting the best!

Here’s what the final product from this workflow. Now let’s take a look at a couple of other sequences using the same source image.

In this second sequence, I started with the “Alice” filter, which is one of the fx filters that come in the Florence FX Pack that is available as an in-app purchase.

Given the delicate colors in “Alice”, I chose the “Thin” line weight.

For the same reasons as the last setting, I picked a lighter exposure setting, in this case Exposure #6.

Here’s the final product from this workflow. Time now to take a look at a couple of the “Novelty” filters that come with Etchings.

The “Air Mail” Fx filter helps you create a fun postage stamp style image. Perfect for an Elephant House!

A “Regular” line weight is perfect for a postage stamp!

After a couple of tries, I finally decided that Exposure #6 worked best for this image as well.

And…the final product from this sequence. One more novelty filter…and then I want to show a special feature that comes with Etchings.

“Franklin” uses the U.S. one dollar bill as its inspiration…another fun choice for my source image!

The “Thin” line weight seemed to work best here…

The middle exposure, Exposure #4, was my choice for my “Franklin”…

Pity this isn’t legal…but here’s the final product.

Clicking the “Share” icon in the lower right corner brings up this pop-up menu. From here you can save to your camera roll, which is what I’ve been doing. You can also share to Facebook, Twitter, send an email, as well as open in other apps. This is all typical. What’s special to Etchings is its Advanced Export function. Click on this tab to bring up its control panel.

What this function allows you to do is to save a full resolution (up to 3300×3300) image to your Camera Roll. It also strips off the cropping and effect borders so you have the “raw” image to work with in another app. I’ve turned of the Square Crop function to allow for this…and then clicked on Save to Camera Roll.

Here’s what you get…the same coloration, line weight, and exposure settings as the “Franklin” image…without the novelty border. A great feature if you plan to open your Etching image in another app.

So there you are….a look at four of Etchings fx filters and different line weight and exposure settings. In future tutorials I’ll show you how I’ve combined different apps with Etchings. Stay tuned!!