India Ink converts color or greyscale images to 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 ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/indiaink.html.
Installing
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.
Using
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:
Try these settings, and then click OK. Your original selection will have turned into a black-and-white pattern.
Examining
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.)
Brief Descriptions of the Halftones
Diffusion A perfectly even sprinkling of pixels.
Noise A grainy sprinkling of pixels.
Ripple Sinuous lines that hug the image.
Arabesque Wobbly diagonal ripples, like the graphic at the top.
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.
Historicizing
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.
Finding out more
• Besides Photoshop 2.5 or later, this filter also works with Color It, Fractal Design Painter, and The Cheaper Image. The latter is a simple, free paint program available online from MacUser’s web site; check http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/software/ to download it.
• India Ink is shareware. If you would like to continue using it, you can register it for US$15 by running the Register program that came with it.
• You can check for new releases of India Ink at ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/indiaink.html. If you have ideas for improvements, or commentary, or questions, please email the author at lloyd@kagi.com.
