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Ink

$15.00

Ink is an Effect created for FCPX 10.4.8 or higher. Can be backdated to 10.4.

Ink Effect

Mid-Century Retro

Ink is a layered effect in design. In most cases, you should be able to simply drop this effect on your clip and achieve a beautiful effect. The parameters listed below will help you make adjustments to the various layers to refine the effect to your liking.

Drop on a Clip or Title!

Light Colors
Middle
Dark Colors

— these three sliders adjust the light and dark shades. You will notice that the Middle defaults to 70%, therefore, in general, the effect is more light than dark. Sliding the Light Colors slider will begin to “flood” the effect with more whitespace. Sliding the Dark Colors will increase the amount of dark shades of the effect. Middle allows you to make adjustments in the midrange, both light and dark. You may prefer to start adjusting your image with Middle first, then either Light Colors and/or Dark Colors.

Contrast / Pivot — These two are part of the same control. How the contrast behaves depends on the position of the Pivot. Typically, reducing contrast will create more Middle tones.

Smooth Noise / Angle — These two controls are related. Smooth Noise uses a kind of smudging effect over a distance (by strength). Extreme values of Smooth Noise will give the suggestion of hatching by the Angle degrees.

Thicken Lines — Adds a secondary effect to increase the density of the Ink lines drawn. It’s overall effect may depend on other factors and the parameters you’ve used to refine lines. The default value is 0 and typically, you will want to keep it at this level — but feel free to experiment!

Sharpen Amount — This parameter allows you to alter the amount of sharpening applied to the original clip to produce better outlines. In general, you will want to keep this value at its default maximum. However, this parameter may be lessened if you need to trim the thickness of lines.

Lights/Darks
You can colorize, or tint, these regions of the Ink effect for a more “illustration” effect. Line color will always be black, but lights may be tinted by the Lights color and the darks may be tinted by the Darks color.

Orig. Line Trim — The base effect’s method of drawing the Ink lines. The thickest, or most dense amount of Ink is applied at value 0. Increasing this parameter will begin to trim back the amount of ink applied.

Line Smoothing — This parameter works with Original Line Trim. Line Smoothing will reduct edge noise and thereby reduce the density of the Lines drawn.

Colorize — while Ink is designed for a B&W effect, you can switch this option on and the effect will use the original colors in your clip to blend with the Ink effect. The media takes on the appearance of a gouache effect.

Notes:

Apply this Effect twice for a more intense effect.

If you need to apply a sharpening effect, you can and should drag the effect to above Ink in the Effects inspector. For extra sharpening, SC KeyFX – Sharpen is the recommended tool.

You can enhance the coloring of Ink by apply a Hue/Saturation effect and again, drag it up above Ink in the Effects Inspector. For better color control, SC KeyFX – scKey Fill is the recommended tool. It not only handles the hue and saturation, but you can blend a fill color into the mix.

Installation Instructions.

Keep up to date with Sight-Creations on Twitter.

A good place to see all of my effects as well as several tutorials and other demonstrations in use is on my YouTube channel.

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