It would be nice to have an Ink mode that lets you select a set of colours like the Shading mode does, and paints with the colour from the set that is most similar in value* to what’s already on the canvas.
This mode would make it easy to draw patterns and such on already-shaded objects. For example, here’s what it might look like with a green colour ramp selected:
This gif was made by duplicating the layer to be recoloured, recolouring all of it, and then erasing the unneeded bits. This isn’t a bad workflow, but it gets tedious quickly when dealing with multiple layers. Another method is to use selections and the fill tool, but this is also tedious, especially when many colours are involved, and it lacks the immediacy of painting with the colours.
* Matching colours by value should work nicely, but this mode could be even more useful by being able to specify an input colour set as well. The index of the input colour that’s closest to the canvas colour would be the index of the output colour to use. This extra “translation” step would allow this tool to do things like recolour with a significantly darker/lighter palette or with an inverse value ramp, or to simultaneously paint with several ramps based on hue.
That’s an awesome suggestion!
An alternative way it could work that would offer more control over the recoloring process is if it were to have 2 color ranges instead of one - for the colors to be replaced and the colors that should replace them, each matched one-above-the-other. This will unhook it from value matching, because the two color ranges might have very different values for brightest and darkest shades - take for example if you want to recolor a bright yellow object into a dark purple one - the values will get mismatched by two or three levels.
Still, your way is the quicker and more user-friendly, so perhaps we could have 2 new modes - “Quick recolor” and “Recolor”
Thats a great ideia, ink modes are such special feature on aseprite but you dont use it so much that could be a great way to focus some needed attention to our poor boi
Hi there is it like a “quantization ink”? (maybe the term quantization is a little confusing). Should it work as the shading ink them? or just as quantization?
Another ink (unrelated to this) that I can think of is selecting a region in the canvas, getting all colors from the region, and creating the color shade with those colors automatically (it should be similar to the current Shading Ink but colors could be selected directly from the selected region on the canvas).
great to know you still thinking of new types of ink @dacap kthis last one seems particulary pratical, i would be a great feature, also using “threshold ink” term would be far less confusing dude
It should be an ink mode that basically lets you remap colours from one ramp to another (but with the benefits of an ink mode, i.e. you’d get to paint this remapping). Quantization would only be an incidental step in this process, happening in case of artwork where the source image/selection has more colours than the destination ramp.
Still not sure about both names (quantization, threshold). Probably just “Best Fit Ink” or something like that, just straight forward.
I’m a little confused here An ink to remap from “one ramp” → “another ramp” would require to select two ramps. The quantization ink I thought is just a way to paint over RGB colors and match those colors with the current select ramp (there are no two ramps, it just matches RGB pixels from the canvas into a specific color of the ramp). It means that you cannot remap “any color ramp” → “other arbitrary color ramp” (e.g. to invert colors).
Yes, I thought about this option. Like a button/option to get the colors from the selection and create the ramp. I’m still not 100% sure about the specific UI, but something to add in this place maybe:
Imo the names “Recolor ink” and “Quick recolor ink” are the simplest most straight-forward you could get. And they describe the function pretty well too.
That’s why I described selecting two colour sets in the OP (in the last paragraph, which describes a stronger version of this mode).
The “simple” version of the tool (requiring just one ramp) wouldn’t allow arbitrary remappings, but has a simpler UI. But the best version of this tool would allow setting two ramps to create arbitrary mappings.
Maybe not quantization, but more general remapping one set of colors to another set of colors. These two sets may have different color counts. And also have any shades, even reversed ones/mixed/etc. i.e. Remapping Ink. This way it will solve both problems of painting over existing shades and remapping of desired colors at desires places in image. Maybe simple Reshading Ink will be useful too as seprate ink or [v] Reshading checkbox in Shading Ink with optional second set of colors it will modify (if empty it could work over any colors i.e. do plain recoloring). Or even not just checkbox, but three modes of Shading Ink: Shading, Reshading, Remapping
P.S. Oh, eishiya already wrote about two variants of ink. I endorse it.
is it like a “quantization ink”? (maybe the term 
Still not sure about both names (quantization, threshold). Probably just “Best Fit Ink” or something like that, just straight forward.
An ink to remap from “one ramp” → “another ramp” would require to select two ramps. The quantization ink I thought is just a way to paint over RGB colors and match those colors with the current select ramp (there are no two ramps, it just matches RGB pixels from the canvas into a specific color of the ramp). It means that you cannot remap “any color ramp” → “other arbitrary color ramp” (e.g. to invert colors).
