Changes in motion :


Dear Black Ink users,

It’s been a long time coming but we are finally ready and happy to announce the release of Black Ink 2020!

This new version introduces a whole lot of new features, the biggest of them being the brand new layer editor.
Not only will you be able to handle more layers but also discover and leverage a completely new and innovative nodal system, in line with our procedural philosophy.
We propose a combination of layer stack and nodes to give you a powerful non-destructive solution while maintaining ease of use.

You are going to discover an entirely new way of managing your layers that will give you more flexibility, freedom and new possibilities for your creations!

We are very sorry for the long wait but we embarked on a huge endeavour with this feature and couldn’t stop until we were able to give you the best experience we can. Our independence and small team are what keep this passion alive and we really hope you can see how much care we put in this huge update.

If you already own Black Ink you will get this update for free, as we committed to.

In order to maintain this fair licensing plan and still develop our dream software, we are going to launch a Patreon campaign soon to enable those willing to support us a little bit further. So if you’re interested or know someone who might be, you can spread the word and help us making the best, ground-breaking, innovative digital painting software on the market!

Video tutorials will follow but we put some documentation about the new layer editor here.

You are welcome to give your feedback and come discuss on:
Discord
Steam
Bleank Forum

See you soon and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
On your stylus... ready, set... Draw!

Geraldine



New Layer editor panel
We replaced the previous fixed 8 layers with a nodal editor where you can truly compose your drawing
Important > You have the walkthrough here



New Layers number is now unlimited and they can go up to 64K pixels in size

New Layer properties panel
You have all your node details and parameters on a dedicated panel



New Search in preferences



New Display Monitor color Management



New Possibility to hide layer content outside of the current canvas ( Shortcut V )

Off
For example you can keep a color palette or a model


On
You have only your final canvas


New “Handle eraser state of stylus” Option. Help Huion’s users to fix this problem

New Brush - Calligraphy gel ink



New Brush - Hair trail



New Brush - Blurry Watercolor



New Brush - Wet Watercolor



New Brush - Watercolor



New Brush - Watercolor pen



New Brush - Dotted dissolve 24px



New Brush - Stencil brush



New Brush - Hair Dissolve 24 px



New Brush - Pencil 2px



Fixed Rotation bug when using the Hold R shortcut in a Black Ink window with a scale different of 100%
Fixed randomly the Clear button in search box is visible but can’t be clicked
Fixed Halo with the Simple Round pen ( see )
Fixed Using brushes with readback on canvas view can generate weird colors on view borders
Fixed Sometimes it was difficult to Drop a Panel into a Docking pane header.
Fixed Sometimes the stroke shows invalid touches at the beginning or end of the stroke
Fixed Multiply Blending : Now when the alpha’s Backdrop is null the content of the foreground is preserved
Fixed JPG & PNG exported image doesn’t embedded an ICC color profile
Fixed Incorrect transparent color picking with eyedropper
Fixed If the user interface is resized,when using crop,transformation or selection tool there is a rendering offset in the preview area.
Fixed Incorrect mask zone of the crop in drawing viewport
Fixed Brush using Dual Primitive drawn with the “View Constant Brush Size” disabled was buggy

Fixed A lot of different crashes..

Improvement Zoom is now performed according to the location of the cursor
Improvement Better performance when using the quick transform tool
Improvement Better performance with undo and redo
Improvement Better performance when drawing and moving the canvas
Improvement Improved blending quality when using low opacity brushes
Improvement More compact UI for Child Floating Windows

Dear Black Ink users,

First of all, we would like to thank you for your patience with this upcoming update which is in the starting blocks!

To polish this update we’re calling our most daring users, at least those who have registered as beta testers, to test the first version of Black Ink which features nodal layers.

With your help and your feedback we will be able to address what needs to be corrected in the layer editor, and the panel of layer properties.

You are welcome to give your feedback and discuss on:
Discord/#Beta
Steam / Beta test
Bleank Forum

We put some nice documentation about the layer editor here, feel free to have a look at it.
And here you have the change log.

Again, if you need more information, don't hesitate to contact us.

To your styluses and keyboards!
See you soon and have fun testing the new features

Dear Black Ink users,

Since it has been some time since our last news we’d like to inform you that our next update is still under development and is progressing very well!
We are creating a new layer system with nodal tools.


As always we want to make these new features easily accessible to all of you, but also to provide a powerful tool that will allow you to have a lot more freedom (non destructive layers, visual effects creations, colors adjustments, instantiable layers... ) and of course many more layers!


This is a really huge update and for the first part we will have more layers, a layer editor and some basics nodes like layer stack, layer mask and blend operators…

You can check a preview of what to expect with the next update (by following this link).


Nodal layers screenshot



We thank you for your patience and hope that many of you will appreciate these innovations.

See you soon

Bleank TEAM

Dear Black Ink users,

If you think your Black Ink’s user interface is too small with your new high resolution screen you should enjoy this update!
Indeed, from now your user interface is resizable!

We invite you to watch our two latest videos to learn tips and more.
The first one shows the latest features added and the second one new default brushes.

If you need to know more about this update you can have a look at our change log and if you want to know what we are working on you can have a look at this link.

Meanwhile, we wish you a very good summer!

See you soon

Bleank Team

Changes in motion ( also covering previous updates ):





List of changes :

New Native High DPI Screen display support.
Black Ink now automatically scale the user interface according to the OS settings.
The user can modify this scaling by clicking the the BI Logo on the top left of each window. The customised scaling will be saved by each individual Black Ink’s window
The Ctrl+Wheel and the Ctrl+Q shortcut are introduced to set the scaling



Fixed Some crash when saving a BKD
Fixed Some crash when Changing a Shortcut after moving the focus to another panel of control.
Fixed Some crash/Freeze when loading a lot of textures when opening the Brush Manager
Fixed Sometimes Black Ink suffers a severe hang/freeze when opening the Brush Manager
Fixed The Elastic Gizmo ( visible with some smoothness is set ) was not displayed
Fixed some layout problem when the Preference Keyboard Tab when stacked
Fixed Can’t DragDrop color from the Brush Preview color selector into preference
Fixed The command “Copy Merged” wrongly took invisible layers into the operation

Some shortcuts have been moved from the Global context to the Canvas View Context ( Flip Vertical, Flip Horizontal and DrawsInCanvasView )
Better Eraser effect when using smudge brushes



You can now use the keyword “key” and “hold” in the Preference shortcut search bar.
When using the “Zoom in and out” command ( Hold Q shortcut ) the zoom is made from the cursor position instead of the centre of the View. Moreover when moving the cursor outside of the window the movement doesn’t stop.
Darker background for the BrushPreview editor to avoid confusion with the normal or secondary viewport
You can use Wheel to zoom on top of the rendering indicator.

BSL it’s now possbile to use input modifier for BSL function like in this example
BSL the function matrix3FromRaw is now really available

Dear Black Ink users,

If you think your Black Ink’s user interface is too small with your new high resolution screen you should enjoy this update!
Indeed, from now your user interface is resizable!

We invite you to watch our two latest videos to learn tips and more.
The first one shows the latest features added and the second one new default brushes.

If you need to know more about this update you can have a look at our change log and if you want to know what we are working on you can have a look at this link.

Meanwhile, we wish you a very good summer!

See you soon

Bleank Team

Changes in motion ( also covering previous updates ):





List of changes :

New Native High DPI Screen display support.
Black Ink now automatically scale the user interface according to the OS settings.
The user can modify this scaling by clicking the the BI Logo on the top left of each window. The customised scaling will be saved by each individual Black Ink’s window
The Ctrl+Wheel and the Ctrl+Q shortcut are introduced to set the scaling



Fixed Some crash when saving a BKD
Fixed Some crash when Changing a Shortcut after moving the focus to another panel of control.
Fixed Some crash/Freeze when loading a lot of textures when opening the Brush Manager
Fixed Sometimes Black Ink suffers a severe hang/freeze when opening the Brush Manager
Fixed The Elastic Gizmo ( visible with some smoothness is set ) was not displayed
Fixed some layout problem when the Preference Keyboard Tab when stacked
Fixed Can’t DragDrop color from the Brush Preview color selector into preference
Fixed The command “Copy Merged” wrongly took invisible layers into the operation

Some shortcuts have been moved from the Global context to the Canvas View Context ( Flip Vertical, Flip Horizontal and DrawsInCanvasView )
Better Eraser effect when using smudge brushes



You can now use the keyword “key” and “hold” in the Preference shortcut search bar.
When using the “Zoom in and out” command ( Hold Q shortcut ) the zoom is made from the cursor position instead of the centre of the View. Moreover when moving the cursor outside of the window the movement doesn’t stop.
Darker background for the BrushPreview editor to avoid confusion with the normal or secondary viewport
You can use Wheel to zoom on top of the rendering indicator.

BSL it’s now possbile to use input modifier for BSL function like in this example
BSL the function matrix3FromRaw is now really available

Dear Black Ink users,

We’re very glad to announce a new update for Black Ink!

You can now define your shortcuts for everything

We have added the possibility of using brushes with several textures, which will give you more freedom in creating material effects. We also improved the eraser.

One of the biggest time consuming work we did is an optimization for very resource expensive brushes, without impacting the user experience.
Thus, even if the GPU is busy computing an expensive stroke, it’s still possible to draw with no latency.

We fixed a problem that made Black Ink not appear on the Desktop since Windows 10 Creator Update.

Feel free to let us know about your experience and your suggestions!

See you soon!

Bleank Team




List of changes :

New Shortcut Customization
The user can now customize Black Ink shortcuts in the Preferences Panel > Keyboard




New Default Brushes

• Charcoal dual Texture
  
• Charcoal dual texture lines 62px
  
• Charcoal background pattern 40px
  
• Ink droplet bicolor canvas fill
  
• One Edge textured 24px
  
• Felt pen textured 16px
  
• Airbrush texture pattern 12px
  
• Random color shift textured
  
• Smudge Charcoal background pattern 40px
  
• Smudge noise colored
  
• Smudge expand colored 50px
  
• Scribble Circles 20px

New Texture resources are automatically reloaded if modified on disk

New A rendering indicator shows if the canvas isn’t 100% accurate due to a background rendering process




Fixed Performance problems when using ReadBack brushes on big canvas
Fixed Black Ink Window wasn’t displayed on Windows 10 Creator Update ( see issue )
Fixed Crash when inverting the current selection
Fixed Crash when using the Merge All function
Fixed Crash when tried to crop with an active selection
Fixed Crash when trying to reload a corrupted BKD
Fixed ctrl+z(undo) doesn’t respond immediately after selecting color, different brush
Fixed some crashes when editing the source code of a BSL
Fixed some crashes due to a RAM usage overflow
Fixed entering a hexadecimal value in the color picker displayed the wrong corresponding color
Fixed Saving in wrong path when the target path contained a ‘.’
Fixed Black Ink main or Child window sometimes doesn’t resize/maximize correctly on multi-monitor system.

The Step brush exposes now parameters to generate the position of a second primitive
BSL with custom blending can now be used as an Eraser when using the idatas.eraser parameter
Autorecover files are now deleted only after 2 weeks ( see issue )

Dear Black Ink users,

We’re very glad to announce a new update for Black Ink!

You can now define your shortcuts for everything

We have added the possibility of using brushes with several textures, which will give you more freedom in creating material effects. We also improved the eraser.

One of the biggest time consuming work we did is an optimization for very resource expensive brushes, without impacting the user experience.
Thus, even if the GPU is busy computing an expensive stroke, it’s still possible to draw with no latency.

We fixed a problem that made Black Ink not appear on the Desktop since Windows 10 Creator Update.

Feel free to let us know about your experience and your suggestions!

See you soon!

Bleank Team




List of changes :

New Shortcut Customization
The user can now customize Black Ink shortcuts in the Preferences Panel > Keyboard



New Default Brushes

• Charcoal dual Texture
  
• Charcoal dual texture lines 62px
  
• Charcoal background pattern 40px
  
• Ink droplet bicolor canvas fill
  
• One Edge textured 24px
  
• Felt pen textured 16px
  
• Airbrush texture pattern 12px
  
• Random color shift textured
  
• Smudge Charcoal background pattern 40px
  
• Smudge noise colored
  
• Smudge expand colored 50px
  
• Scribble Circles 20px

New Texture resources are automatically reloaded if modified on disk

New A rendering indicator shows if the canvas isn’t 100% accurate due to a background rendering process



Fixed Performance problems when using ReadBack brushes on big canvas
Fixed Black Ink Window wasn’t displayed on Windows 10 Creator Update ( see issue )
Fixed Crash when inverting the current selection
Fixed Crash when using the Merge All function
Fixed Crash when tried to crop with an active selection
Fixed Crash when trying to reload a corrupted BKD
Fixed ctrl+z(undo) doesn’t respond immediately after selecting color, different brush
Fixed some crashes when editing the source code of a BSL
Fixed some crashes due to a RAM usage overflow
Fixed entering a hexadecimal value in the color picker displayed the wrong corresponding color
Fixed Saving in wrong path when the target path contained a ‘.’
Fixed Black Ink main or Child window sometimes doesn’t resize/maximize correctly on multi-monitor system.

The Step brush exposes now parameters to generate the position of a second primitive
BSL with custom blending can now be used as an Eraser when using the idatas.eraser parameter
Autorecover files are now deleted only after 2 weeks ( see issue )

Hello everybody,

Following our latest update we announce you that Black Ink’s selling price will be raised to $59.99.
However, before this price raise we are offering a special discount from 9th to 19th February on steam and our website.
So if you want to have Black Ink, don’t hesitate now, you will benefit freely of all the subsequent updates.

See you soon
Bleank Team

Hello everybody,

Following our latest update we announce you that Black Ink’s selling price will be raised to $59.99.
However, before this price raise we are offering a special discount from 9th to 19th February on steam and our website.
So if you want to have Black Ink, don’t hesitate now, you will benefit freely of all the subsequent updates.

See you soon
Bleank Team

Hello everyone and happy new year!

We’re very glad to announce a new major update for Black Ink!
This update is very important as it offers brand new tools that will expand even more the field of brush creation.
It took a lot of time and effort to integrate these new powerful tools, while ensuring the continuity of performance and comfort you have always been used to experience with previous versions of Black Ink.
This is why we hope that you will like using it as much as we liked making it.

You can now apply any type of effect on your brush like smudge, blur, procedural shapes, textures, shadows, relief, gradients, etc.
These effects are fully editable within Black Ink thanks to a new dedicated language called BSL ( Brush Shader Language )

You can already access the video presentation for this update

We would also like to thank you for your patience, we didn’t want to release this version too early.
Keep in mind that we’re developing Black Ink with the intent of bringing you a complete and powerful generative art creation software/solution that will, hopefully, leave its mark in the future.

In the months to come, we will integrate UI scaling so Black Ink can be used on 4K screens. We will also add support for more layers and, of course, plenty of new brushes with even better effects.

See you soon !

Changes in motion :





List of changes :

New Use shaders on brushes
You can now select a Shader effect for a Brush



New BSL Editor



New Brush Preview Panel



New Brush Manager in an independent panel with search and filter options



New Brush Float parameter has been redesigned



New Brush Vector 2 parameter has been redesigned



New Brush Color parameter has been redesigned :

• Solid color type now can be embedded in the Brush Parameter bar
  
• You can now choose between 2 types of color picking interface ( normal or Wheel )
  
• Gradient editor has been redesigned
  
• New Autopicking color type is introduced. In this mode the color above the cursor when starting a Stroke is automatically returned ( like a EyeDropper )
  
• New Raw color type was introduced. Here a color created entirely with the controller editor is returned.

New Brush texture parameter
New Brush gradient parameter
New Some default controllers have been added
New some default Brushes have been added
Shape step


Smudge blur


Canvas fill

• Fixed Pink flashes on the User Interface on Intel GPU ( see issue, issue, issue )
  
• Fixed Image saving issue on AMD GPU ( see issue, issue )
  
• Fixed Flickering in the Brush Preview windows when moving Brush Parameters
  
• Fixed crash when using the transform tool on tiny canvas resolution ( see issue )
  
• Fixed crash when tried to crop with an active selection
  
• Fixed Popup on child window transparency issue ( see issue, issue )
  
• Fixed if a crash occurrs, the file is recovered with its orignal filename and directory ( see issue )
  
• Fixed Incorrect Hue color in color picker ( see issue and issue )
  
• Fixed Fill bug from the layer menu ( see issue )
  
• Fixed Invalid Azimuth interpolation along a stroke
  
• If an invalid stylus calibration is detected the error message will only be displayed one time per application launch.
  
• The size of the drawing cursor is now clamped and can’t exceed 96 pixels
  
• The fade in/out of the cursor when drawing has been changed.
  
• The trial time for the demo version is now 4 Hours.