2. The Darkening Blendmodes
I've named the next group of blendmodes the 'Darkening' blendmodes, it consist of the following blendmodes:
Darken
Multiply
Linear Burn
Color Burn
Unsurprisingly they all have in common that they all make your image darker. The result is either the same or darker than your Base layer.
Another feature they have in common is that blending with the colour white leaves the image unchanged. You make use of this to 'mask' out effects without actually having to do any painting. For example, if you have a texture with a dirt stain, lighten the image until the part surrounding the stain is completely white. Now blend the stain with the Darkening blendmodes and only the dark stain will show:
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Using the Multiply blendmode to mask a stain without actually having to paint a mask. By lightening the image until the background is completely white you can apply the stain without having to do any tedious erasing of the background.
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To show the differences between the 4 darkening blending modes I've put them all in one image:
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All Darkening blendmodes: for all of these blendmodes blending with the colour white leaves the image unchanged.
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Out of these 4 blending modes Multiply is probably the most useful. The other blending modes tend to add too much contrast which can make textures look unrealistic. Be sure to experiment though, don't take my word for it. Sometimes a Color Burn set to 10% can be exactly what you need.
Compares the base and blend colour and picks the darkest.
The comparison is done separately for each of the red, green and blue channels so the result is smoother than you might expect. The hardness of the transition still makes it less useful.
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The Darken blending mode. Notice how the gray scale bar stops rather abruptly, but the coloured bar appears half transparent in places. This is because each channel is compared separately.
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Does exactly what it advertises: it multiplies the two colours.
Think of each colour with a value between 0 and 1, where 1 means the brightest. Multiplying with 1 gives the same value, so the image is unchanged. For a value lower than 1 the image gets darker.
For example: white x gray = gray
Translates to: 1 x 0.5 = 0.5
The effect is very much like looking through coloured glass. If the glass is dark you can't see much through it, if the glass is transparent (white) it won't make much difference to what you see.
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Multiply can be compared to looking through coloured glass.
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Here is an example of the Multiply blend mode with the gradient test patterns:
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The Multiply blending mode.
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Multiply is the best blending mode to add dirt and stains to textures. The good thing about his blending mode is that you can make textures darker and change the colour, but the Base layer will always shine through.
This is also the correct blend mode to apply a baked shadow pass to your texture.
Examples
Here are some examples of the uses of the Multiply blendmode. Note that all of these examples make use of the fact that blending with white leaves the image unchanged.
Blending blood splatter with Multiply:
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Blending dirt splatters with Multiply, the white parts of the blend layer have no influence.
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Blending stains on a wall with Multiply:
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Multiply is also great for leaking stains.
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Applying a baked shadow pass to your texture:
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Multiply is also the right the blending mode to apply a baked shadow pass to your texture.
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Similar to the Multiply blend mode but introduces more contrast to the result.
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Linear Burn: very much like Multiply but also adds more contrast.
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Like Linear burn, but besides adding more contrast it also makes the colours much more saturated.
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Color Burn adds more contrast and makes the colours much more saturated.
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Here is the image with all the Darkening blendmodes again. The difference in contrast and saturation between Multiply, Linear Burn and Color Burn is very noticeable when you see them next to each other:
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The Linear Burn creates more contrast than Multiply. Color Burn adds more saturation on top of this.
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Copyright 2007 - CGTextures
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