Many scholars researching manuscripts are interested in the characterisation of the type of inks found on such manuscripts as this adds vital information to the identification of the age and source of a manuscript. Our knowledge about the composition of the inks used in manuscripts is limited and even more importantly in order to analyse the composition of the inks we had to use destructive chemical analysis. In most cases this meant the extraction and analysis of actual samples from the original manuscript. With old and valuable collections even the use of very small samples is not a viable option as archivists and librarians will not allow any intentional destruction of the document, however small that it is. An automated computer-based technique for the characterization of inks of unknown chemical composition, offers a desirable and non-destructive method that can be applied to most manuscripts. In this paper we present such a new method, which is based on advanced digital image processing techniques and results to an automated and non-destructive examination of manuscripts by providing visual analysis of ink samples. Our techniques have been applied to inks found on Byzantine manuscripts. These inks were characterized through the creation of computation models using only visual information. The images used in our experiments were taken within the visible and near infrared spectrum.