Xetcher

A quiet editor for cleaning up scans of etchings and engravings. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and nothing is saved unless you export.

Getting an image in and out

Tap the + to open a scan. You can also drop a file onto the workspace or paste from the clipboard at any time — including to replace the current image. Export PNG saves your work with transparency preserved, so erased areas stay clear.

Tools

Hand `H`	Drag to move around the image.
Magic wand `W`	Tap a tone to delete it. Raise the tolerance to catch more; turn on Everywhere to remove that tone across the whole image — ideal for stripping aged paper backgrounds.
Eraser `E`	Four paint modes: Clear erases to transparency; Color paints a solid tone (use Pick to sample one from the image); Lighten and Darken are dodge and burn — brushed local exposure at a chosen strength, the darkroom's defining craft. Round or square, from 1 px up, with Pencil pressure.
Knife `K`	Cut a section — freehand lasso or a dragged box. Cut away removes what you circled; Keep only removes everything else; To drawer lifts a copy into the drawer without touching the original. Gap and Tie are for stencils: drag a straight line and Gap cuts a clear channel of the chosen width — the space between a fin and a body — while Tie lays a bar of the stencil colour to join a floating piece to the rest. Cut gaps after a stencil is applied; Smooth would close them.
Burin `B`	Engrave new marks. Freehand draws with Pencil pressure driving the line's swell. Line lays a straight tapered stroke — drag one along existing hatching to capture its angle, then tick Lock and every stroke after is parallel. Hatch fills a circled region with parallel lines at your angle and spacing; run it twice at crossing angles for cross-hatch tone. Tremor adds a hair of hand-waver so new lines sit alongside period work; Pick samples the plate's own ink color. The frisket acts as a resist.
Drawer	Holds cuttings lifted with the knife. Tap a thumbnail to edit that cutting with the full toolset, tap Plate to return to the original, and Export all to save every cutting. The drawer persists when you import a new scan, so you can collect cuttings from several pages. Switching clears the undo history.
Frisket `P`	Paint a protective veil over areas you want to keep — like masking fluid in printmaking. The wand, eraser, knife, burin, lift, and despeckle will not touch protected areas. Lift mode removes veil for touch-ups. Nibs: Round and Square brushes, or Tone — tap a colour and the whole contiguous region (or everywhere, with Everywhere) is veiled in one go, the fastest way to isolate a subject against a flat ground. Shape nibs give straight edges without tracing: Rect and Ellipse are dragged out, Poly is tapped corner by corner and closed by tapping the first corner again (Esc abandons it). Constrain makes squares, circles, and 15° polygon edges. Shapes obey the mode, so Protect adds and Lift subtracts — rectangle, minus ellipse, plus polygon builds a form by construction. With Edge-aware on, a shape is a boundary instead of a fill: it veils by tone outward from the shape's centre and stops at colour edges or the outline, so a loose rectangle around a subject veils just the subject. Nodes turns the whole veil, however it was made, into an editable outline: drag a node to nudge the edge; a selected node shows its two tangent handles — drag one to shape the curve (on a smooth node the other stays in line; on a corner they move independently) — and double-tap the node to reset handles, or to switch between smooth and corner, tap the small mark on an edge to add a node there, tap a node and Delete node to remove it. Turn Nodes off (or pick another tool) to bake the outline back into the veil; Esc abandons the edit. The trace follows the stencil panel's Simplify setting, and despeckling first keeps the node count sane. Invert swaps veiled and unveiled across the image's pixels, so you can veil the easy background and flip it. Pick a veil colour that shows against your plate; it is remembered. The veil is never exported.
Tint `T`	Hand-colouring, as on a tinted print. A region is a mask plus a colour: build it with exactly the frisket's nibs — brush, Tone, shapes, Edge-aware, Nodes — in Add or Subtract mode, then set its hue and saturation (saturation is also strength: 0 desaturates the patch) and a feather for the edge. New starts another region; tap a chip to return to one. The plate's luminance is kept and only hue and saturation change, so it works on colour photographs as a recolour too. The frisket resists tint. Preview is live; Apply bakes it, Revert discards. To recolour a baked region later, the Tone nib picks up its flat hue in one tap.
Stencil `S`	Turns a shape into a flat silhouette — a cut-out in one colour. Frisket uses whatever is under the veil as the shape; Ink uses every opaque pixel, for when you've already cleared the background. Solidify fills holes inside the shape so it reads as one solid form; Smooth melts jagged edges and stray hairs. Preview is live — tap Apply to commit, Revert to walk away. Applying from the frisket peels the veil (undo brings it back), since it would otherwise resist every tool on the shape it just made. Output Shape is the silhouette itself; Sheet is the stencil in the printmaker's sense — the material the shape is cut out of, with a margin added around it on Apply, so the result is one connected piece ready to cut. Export SVG traces whatever is on the canvas into a single compound path: every island and every hole is a subpath of one shape, so a fish with detached fins still moves and scales as one object in a vector editor. Simplify sets how far the trace may stray from the pixels; Curves smooths the polygon into béziers. Knife a subject To drawer first if you want the silhouette and the plate to coexist.
Crop `C`	Drag a frame, then tap Crop.
Rotate `R`	Quarter turns, flips, and a Straighten slider for crooked scans — nudge the angle, then tap Apply.
Tone `A`	The darkroom panel, with a histogram to guide you. Brightness, contrast, and saturation preview live and bake at export. Everything else works on pixels — black and white points, Shadows and Highlights recovery, Warmth for color casts, Sharpen for soft scans, and threshold for pure black-and-white — tap Apply to commit.
Lift ink `L`	Turns a page scan into a printable facsimile. Flatten lighting cancels gutter shadow and vignetting first, then the paper and ink points map darkness to opacity — paper dissolves, ink stays, and letter edges keep their anti-aliasing. Unify ink recolors every stroke to one tone (pure black prints crispest, or pick the original ink's color). Despeckle sweeps away dust and foxing up to a chosen size. The frisket shields anything — a rubric, an illuminated capital — from all of it. Settings persist between imports, so a book becomes: import, Apply, export, next page.
Clear	Closes the image, the drawer, and all work — tap twice to confirm. To simply swap the plate for a new scan, just import again; that keeps the drawer.
Undo	Steps back through the last six changes. `Ctrl`+`Z` on a keyboard.

On iPad

One finger pans, pinch zooms — always, no matter which tool is active. Apple Pencil draws with the current tool, and pressure varies the eraser size (toggle this off in the eraser options if you prefer a fixed size). Your palm is ignored while the Pencil is in contact.

To install: open this page in Safari, tap the share button, and choose Add to Home Screen. Xetcher will then open full screen like an app.

With a mouse and keyboard

Scroll to zoom. Pan with the Hand tool, by holding Space, or with a middle-button drag. [ and ] change brush size, 0 fits the image, 1 is 100%, Enter applies a crop, straighten, or tone change, Esc cancels it.

A good order of work

Straighten and crop first. Then tone — raise the black point and lower the white point until the ink is dense and the paper is clean, then Apply. Frisket over the artwork you want to keep. Wand with Everywhere to clear the background. Knife or eraser for the rest. Export.

For a silhouette: frisket the subject with the Tone nib (or veil the background and Invert), tidy the veil edge with Lift (tick Edge-aware and the brush stops at colour edges, so you can scrub roughly), then Stencil with Frisket as the source. Apply, then Knife → Gap for any deliberate separations, then Export PNG or SVG.