India Ink converts color or greyscale images into several unusual styles of black-and-white halftones, suitable for black-and-white printers. It’s a filter that works with popular paint programs like Photoshop, Color-It, Fractal Design Painter, and The Cheaper Image. This manual assumes that you are familiar with your paint software.
You can check for new releases of India Ink at www.flamingpear.com .
This manual has these sections:
Installing it
Trying it out
The controls
Halftone styles
A hint
Version history
How to Register
Installing it
Drop India Ink into your paint program’s Plug-Ins folder. When you start your paint program, the Filter menu should contain an item called Flaming Pear, and that should lead to a sub-menu containing India Ink.
Although it is not necessary, India Ink’s interface will look better if QuickTime is present on your computer. The latest version of QuickTime is available online at http://quicktime.apple.com .
Trying it out
Start with an image in RGB or greyscale mode, and use any selection tool to select part of the image.
Select the India Ink filter. A dialog box will appear:
India Ink needs Photoshop 3.0 or an equivalent to present the image preview. With some other paint programs, the filter will still work, but there will be no preview.
Click OK. The progress bar will appear, and then your original selection will become a black-and-white pattern.
The controls
Bring the filter back and behold the controls.
Style: several different styles of halftone are available. (Some of the styles do not make use of all the other controls; so when you choose such a style, some other controls may become inactive.)
Scale: This control lets you magnify the halftone pattern by 1x, 2x, or 4x.
Line: This control lets you choose five different line weights. It has a slightly different effect with each style, so be sure to experiment.
Gamma: Some styles draw light areas and dark areas with different patterns. The gamma control lets you draw dark areas with the pattern used for light areas. Or vice versa. Or both; see below.
Warping: Some styles let the colors in the image warp their pattern; use the warping control to say how much.
Angle: For warpable styles, the angle control sets the direction of warping. (Except for the style “wave,” where it sets the angle of the wavy pattern.)
Next to the Angle control is the Glue Mode popup, which controls how India Ink merges its graphics with the original image. Most of the time you’ll want to use Normal, but other modes can produce special effects in color.
Just to the right of the Glue Mode popup is the Use Threshold control. Normally, India Ink compares the brightness of the original image with a complicated patterns of greys called a threshold pattern, and decides whether to output a black or white pixel. The Use Threshold control makes India Ink output the threshold pattern directly. Try it and see - it works best with the unusual glue modes like Subtract.
Down at the left you'll see the Load Preset button and the Save Preset button. With these, you can save your settings in a file and recall them later. (If you also have India Ink for Windows, you can use your preset files on both platforms. Just drop them on the “Mac/Win India Ink presets” app that came with India Ink.)
Nearby, the button with the dice is the Randomizer. Click it and you’ll get random new settings, which is useful for creating new effects.
At the right side of the interface is the preview.
The preview updates automatically whenever you change any setting, but you can turn that off with the “Auto preview” checkbox.
If the selection is too big to fit in the preview square, you can zoom in and out with the preview zoom buttons. When you’re zoomed in, you can drag the preview around with the mouse.
Three more buttons:
OK: Applies the effect to your image.
Cancel: Dismisses the filter, and leaves the image unchanged.
Register: Allows you to type in a registration code.
Halftone styles
Diffusion A perfectly even sprinkling of pixels.
Noise A grainy sprinkling of pixels.
Ripple Sinuous lines that hug the image.
Arabesque Wobbly diagonal ripples.
Wave Ranks of parallel sine waves.
Square chaos Jagged lines like demented barcodes.
Round chaos Large, bold swirls.
Basketweave A twisted grid influenced by the image.
Crosscut A rhomboid grid like an engraving.
Maze Like a maze.
Xor Zillions of tiny triangles.
Splatter Messy rows of splotches.
Flow Parallel-yet-twisted rulings.
Hatching Many patches with curved rulings inside.
Shards A mosaic of irregular fragments.
Bubbles Irregularly arranged circular whorls.
A hint
The results you get with India Ink – or any halftone conversion – are greatly improved by running Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter on the image first. It increases the contrast near the edges in the picture.
Version History
Version 1.4.7 October 1998
Improves speed on G3 computers.
Version 1.4.6 June 1998
Improved stability, and added the conversion utility for settings files.
Version 1.4.5 May 1998
Fixed another display bug similar to 1.4.1.
Version 1.4.1 March 1998
Fixed a display bug that made the text vanish from the popup menus under Mac OS 8.
Version 1.4 December 1997
Added the preview, the presets, and the glue modes.
Version 1.3 December 1996
Added the styles ‘shards’ and ‘bubbles’.
Version 1.2 November 1996
Added the style ‘hatching,’ and redesigned the interface.
Version 1.1 October 1996
The first public release, with 13 halftone styles.
How to Register
• Besides Photoshop 2.5 or later, this filter also works with Fractal Design Painter, Enhance, and Color It.
• India Ink is shareware. If you would like to continue using it beyond 15 days, you can register it for US$15 in these ways:
- Register online at http://order.kagi.com/?LB , using a credit card.
- Run the Register program that comes with India Ink, which you can download through www.flamingpear.com .
- Order by phone with a credit card at +1 (510) 601-5244 during business hours in the Pacific time zone. The phone-order company would charge you an extra US$5 for this.
- Or, you can send a letter to...
Kagi
1442-A Walnut Street #392-LB
Berkeley, California, 94709-1405
USA
... with US$15, saying it’s for India Ink, and you will get a registration code in the mail or email.
Payment is accepted through Kagi, a fee processing service.
Your will get your code after about three days in an email message titled “Thanks for your payment,” or on a postcard if you have no email.
What to do with the code when you get it:
- Your will get your code in an email message titled “Thanks for your payment,” or on a postcard.
- Bring up the filter.
- There should be a button called "Register" near the "Cancel " button. Click the "Register" button.
(If there is no "Register" button, it means somebody has already input the code on this particular computer, and so you're already finished.)
- A new dialog box will appear. Type your code into the proper blank.
- Click OK.
- A thank-you message will appear. You’re done.
• You can check for new releases of the filter at www.flamingpear.com . And if you have ideas for improvements, or commentary, or questions, please email the author at lloyd@kagi.com.
