Inkwell

In one line#

The painting and image-editing studio: brushes, layers, masks, selections, filters and warps, on a canvas that also knows what to do with a photograph.

The layout#

What you do here#

Paint#

Size, opacity, flow and hardness are on the bar, always. Under Brush properties: pressure size and pressure opacity as independent toggles, and smoothing for stabilising a shaky line.

Presets and the brush library are two different lists, four built-in tool presets on one side, nineteen brushes in eight categories on the other. They have their own chapter.

Also here: texture brushes, symmetry, snapping, and stroke smoothing as a separate setting from the brush's own.

Layers#

A full stack: blend modes, opacity, reordering, grouping, duplicating, merging down and flattening. Beyond the basics:

• Adjustment layers: non-destructive colour and tone.
• Layer styles: glow, drop shadow and the rest.
• Masks, including vector masks, with linking and clipping.
• Smart objects.
• Layer comps: saved arrangements of the same stack.
• Blend If: conditional blending by tonal range.

Select#

Marquee, lasso, magic wand, and Select Subject. Selections can be saved, inverted, feathered and turned into masks; a pixel selection can be pulled from a layer directly.

Transform and warp#

Perspective warp, puppet warp, liquify, crop with its own tool options, seam carving for content-aware resizing, and spot healing / content-aware fill.

Filter#

The Filters menu is long. Grouped roughly:

Several run on the GPU, and are labelled as such.

Actions and history#

Actions record a sequence of steps and replay it. The history panel is non-linear: you can branch away from a state rather than only walking back along one line. Timelapse recording captures the session as a video of the painting being made.

Surface capture#

A studio of its own inside Inkwell, described in Surface Capture Studio below.

The panels you have to go and find#

Several of Inkwell's most useful surfaces are not on screen by default.

Actions and batch#

Actions records a macro: record, replay, edit, share. Batch is its other half: run a recorded action over a pile of files at once. Recording a command once is only worth the trouble if it can then be applied a hundred times, and that is what the pair is for.

Develop, the photo pass#

A Lightroom-shaped module inside Inkwell, applied to a layer non-destructively. Hold Before to see the original at any time; Reset Develop puts the layer back.

Lens and geometry is the part that is not a slider on the pixels: distortion, defish, vertical and horizontal perspective, straighten, with an Auto Straighten that finds the horizon and tells you when it cannot, and chromatic aberration removal.

Local adjustments come in four shapes, and each one is a mask the whole panel then applies through: graduated (start, end, direction), radial (centre, size, feather, invert), brush (paint the mask directly, add or erase), and from selection: which takes the current selection as the mask and can be updated from it later.

Surface Capture Studio#

A studio inside Inkwell that turns a photograph of a real surface into a tileable material, and hands it to Matter. Six steps, in order:

Three things worth knowing before you start:

• The EXIF is used, not just displayed. Focal length and aperture come off the file and the panel suggests a distortion value from them.
• Straighten with four corners is the honest way to remove perspective: drag each corner onto a corner of the real surface. The preview shows the cropped image before straightening, so you can see what you are aiming at.
• Publishing is gated. If something required is missing, the panel names the fields rather than publishing a half-made material. The seam error is the number that tells you whether the tiling actually worked, and it stays visible next to the export button.

What travels to Matter is the prepared image plus the non-destructive recipe, so the preparation stays editable on the other side.

Warping and liquify#

Liquify has seven modes, each one a different way of pushing pixels:

Warp is the other family: a grid you drag by points and handles, with the classic presets, arc, arc upper, arc lower, bulge, shell upper, shell lower, flag and the rest. It needs an unlocked image layer; the panel says so rather than doing nothing.

Making a texture tile#

Seamless Texture offers three methods, and they are not equivalent:

• Offset moves the tiling seams into the middle of the image so you can heal them with the clone and heal tools. Most work, best result.
• Edge blend feathers a border band so opposite edges match. One click, usually good.
• Mirror folds the image into four quadrants. Always tileable, and always symmetric, which reads as a kaleidoscope. The panel says so.

A tiling preview shows the result repeated, and you can flip between original and result while looking at it.

The brushes#

Two different lists, and they are easy to confuse.

Tool presets: Sketch, Ink, Soft Paint, Erase, are the four built-in tool configurations. They cannot be edited; save your own beside them.

The brush library is the bigger one: nineteen brushes in eight categories Basic (round, soft round), Pencils (HB, sketch, charcoal), Inks (ink pen, ink brush, calligraphy), Paints (oil, acrylic, watercolour), Airbrush, Textures (spatter, chalk, pastel, crayon), Effects (glow, stars, sparkle) and Custom.

A dual brush layers a second tip over the first, combined with one of five blend modes, multiply, add, subtract, intersect, overlay, and nine presets (textured, scattered, splatter, grainy, dry brush, bristle, stipple, glow). It is what turns a round brush into a media brush without building one.

Brush Maker builds a custom brush, round or image-tipped, with a live preview, and imports Photoshop .abr packs.

The canvas itself#

• Guides: new guide by orientation and position, plus presets for rule of thirds, golden ratio and centre; snapping is a toggle, and Add guide here is on the right-click menu.
• Crop has its own aspect ratios (free, original, square, presets), a lock, swap dimensions, rule-of-thirds guides with an opacity, and its own straighten.
• Actual Pixels (100 %) and the pixel grid at high zoom are the two views that stop you from judging a detail at the wrong scale.

Files it reads and writes#

Sending work to other studios#

Produces an image, and a surface capture. Accepts images and pixel art.

An Inkwell image is accepted by Composer, Animator, Fusion, Matter and Engine, Inkwell is where most of the flat art in a project starts.

Working with someone else#

Inkwell syncs operation by operation, including brush strokes: every layer operation, masks, filters, canvas resize/rotate/flip, and the active colour. Two people can paint on the same canvas.

Limits and common snags#

• Nothing painting? Check the active layer in the status bar; it may be hidden, locked, or an adjustment layer.
• Pressure does nothing on a mouse. The pressure toggles need a tablet; smoothing helps a mouse instead.
• Built-in presets cannot be edited. Save a copy under your own name.
• A GPU filter falls back to the CPU where the browser has no GPU path, and is slower rather than absent.