Ink does not stop where the plate stops. It soaks into the fibre of the sheet, travels further where the weave is loose, and holds back where the paper is dense. That uneven creep is most of what separates something printed from something rendered.
Spread, then re-threshold
The order matters. Blurring a finished image softens the boundary but leaves it exactly where it was. This works the other way: the ink mask is blurred first, then thresholded again against a noise field standing in for paper fibre.
The result is that ink genuinely crosses its original edge, and how far it gets depends on which direction it went. Two parts of the same stroke bleed different distances, which is what a blur can never do.
Bleed Distance and Fibre Scale
Bleed Distance is the travel budget, expressed as a share of the shorter image side so a preview and a full-resolution export blot identically. Fibre Scale is the size of the weave the ink follows.
These interact. A large bleed over a fine fibre gives a soft halo. The same bleed over a coarse fibre gives fingers and islands, because whole cells of the weave either accept the ink or refuse it. For a stamped look, keep the fibre coarse and the bleed short.
Fibre Resistance
At 0% every direction absorbs equally and the output is a clean dilation, which reads as a digital outline rather than a print. Between 40% and 70% the boundary wanders while the shapes stay legible. Above 85% the ink breaks into disconnected blots, which suits texture work and loses fine detail.
Ink Threshold
Everything downstream depends on this. It decides which parts of the photo become ink before any spreading happens, and it is the control to move first when the output is a solid field or an empty sheet.
Raise Tonal Contrast alongside it when a subject and its background sit close in brightness.
Ink Speckle
Real ink is not one flat value. Speckle varies the ink colour per pixel, which keeps large solid areas from looking like a fill. Under 35% it reads as absorbency. Above that it starts to look like noise.
Limits
The mask is built from luminance, so colours of matching brightness collapse into the same class. A blue logo on a brown field will not separate no matter where the threshold sits. Fix the separation upstream with a channel mixer, then bleed the result.