Black Ink: customisable, GPU-based digital painting
Bleank has updated Black Ink, adding standard ellipse and rectangular selection tools to the digital paint app.
The new functionality brings the workflow of the innovative GPU-based package, which is still officially in beta, closer to one familiar from applications like Photoshop.
Black Ink: a recap
Available publicly for the past couple of years, Black Ink’s unique selling point is its Controllers: a node-based system for customising brush parameters minutely.
It also has a GPU-based rendering engine, making for smooth performance on large images.
If you aren’t familiar with Black Ink, Bleank’s video from Siggraph 2013 (below), gives a flavour of its capabilities.
A more standard Photoshop-like workflow
The latest update (version 0.168.1749, if you want to be specific), couples that with ellipse and rectangular selection tools, complete with the usual Boolean-type operations and keyboard shortcuts.
The new tools bring Black Ink closer to a workflow familiar with from applications like Photoshop. We can’t find a complete feature list on the Bleank site, but you can get some idea of progress from the changelog.
Updated 20 June: Bleank has been in touch to say that it has added a list of current features to its forum. Upcoming features can be found in a separate post.
Pricing and availability
Black Ink is available now for Windows and Mac OS X. The full version costs $44.99/€44.99, or there is a save-disabled trial version for Windows only. The software is also currently available at a discount via Steam.