Please! Better color selector and "pull shapes" like Alchemy

Share your suggestions & ideas for BlackInk
oysteroid
 
Posts: 1
Joined: 25 Jun 2014, 17:24

Please! Better color selector and "pull shapes" like Alchemy

Postby oysteroid » 25 Jun 2014, 18:03

Hello!

First of all, I am enjoying Black Ink! I love being able to use big brushes on a very high resolution canvas without lag. Good job with that! This software has a lot of potential.

One really basic thing that I would like to see is a better color selector that is always open and available. There are too many clicks and/or hovering and waiting to switch colors. It really interrupts the process and is very inefficient the way it is. The sort of color selector I like best is the kind you find in Corel Painter, Manga Studio, and so on, with the hue wheel around the outside and the brightness and saturation in a triangle in the middle. Or a square in the middle is fine too. And it would be nice to have a persistent swatch panel. It would also be nice if you could load a little image into a persistent panel to sample color from.

Also, it is very instinctive for me to switch quickly between a foreground and background color with the 'x' key. Most painting apps have that. That would be very nice to have in Black Ink.

Also, what other painting apps are missing that I think would be awesome is something like the "shapes" and "pull shapes" in Alchemy. If you aren't familiar with it, here it is:
http://al.chemy.org/

You can quickly build up some very appealing textures and whatnot by basically spraying a bunch of random vector shapes with low opacity and a gradient. Try it in Alchemy. Set "Create" to "pull shapes". Set "Affect" to "Gradient". Turn down the opacity. Set the "Style" up on the left to the filled mode. Now, spray some shapes, intermittently switching between black and white. Do this with "mirror" turned on in the "Affect" menu and you can get some really interesting results. If you take my suggestion and do something like this, it would be nice for us to be able to customize our own shape collections as can be done in Alchemy. Also, unlike Alchemy, it would be nice to be able to control the pull shapes a little more with options to control orientation with pen tilt, size with pressure, and so on.

The regular "shapes" tool in Alchemy, in filled mode, is very useful too, especially with gradient turned on.

I love the shapes and pull shapes in Alchemy, but the rest of the program is too limiting. You can't use a big canvas. You can't move the canvas around. You can't change the shape of the canvas. The color selection is terrible. There are no layers. And so on. So ultimately, Alchemy fails. It isn't very usable. It had a lot of potential. But it seems to have been abandoned. And the people who created it don't seem open to seeing it as anything but a way to generate rough, random shapes to be further developed elsewhere. I think something like it has potential to be an amazing way to create very rich finished art. Some really good ideas went into it. But I think it is high time for someone else to take the torch and run with it. Black Ink looks to me like the best place to continue the development of some of those sorts of tools.

I would flip out with happiness if you brought these features into Black Ink! I might have to do a little something with those tools in Alchemy to show you what can be done with them so you'll understand why this should become a regular part of the digital artist's toolset. Black Ink could lead the revolution! And I guarantee that when some good artworks using such tools hit your gallery, you'll be selling more copies! ;)

Thanks for your consideration!

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u2bleank
 
Posts: 1182
Joined: 11 Jun 2012, 10:41

Re: Please! Better color selector and "pull shapes" like Alc

Postby u2bleank » 27 Jun 2014, 14:21

:hi: oysteroid,

First thanks for the great feedback.

One really basic thing that I ... a persistent panel to sample color from.


+1 for the request. You're not the first one to ask for such a feature and we will make something on that field.

Also, it is very instinctive for me to switch quickly between a foreground and background color with the 'x' key. Most painting apps have that. That would be very nice to have in Black Ink.


We don't have the concept of Foreground & Background color. But we can thought about a system to display or switch between favorited colors

Also, what other painting apps are ...you'll be selling more copies! ;)


We well know Alchemy and we have plan to add the same functionality for shape creation.
We currently working on Lasso for selection and the same technique will be used for painting surface.
Stay tuned.

ciao ;)


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