3. The Brightening Blendmodes
The 'Brightening' blendmodes all make your image lighter. The blendmodes in this group are:
Lighten
Screen
Linear Dodge
Color Dodge
These blendmodes are the opposite of the Darkening blendmodes. With these four blendmodes using black has no influence on the result.
To get a good overview of these blendmodes I'll show them all in one image:
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The Brightening blendmodes: they make your image lighter.
For all of these blendmodes blending with the colour black leaves the image unchanged.
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These four blending modes react in exactly the opposite way as the Darkening blend modes. The Screen blendmode is the opposite of Multiply. Linear Dodge has more contrast than Screen (just like Linear Burn vs. Multiply), Color Dodge has more contrast and more saturation.
Compares the Base and Blend colour and picks the lightest.
The comparison is done separately for each of the red, green and blue channels so the result is smoother than you might expect. Just like the Darken blendmode this is not very useful because of the hardness of the transition.
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The Lighten blendmode, the Blend layer is visible where it is lighter than the Base layer
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Screen
Brightens the base layer with the blend layer. The manuals says 'The effect is similar to projecting multiple photographic slides on top of each other.' which is a pretty good comparison.
Here is an example of the Screen blendmode with the gradient test patterns:
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The Screen blending mode.
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The Screen blendmode is useful for making parts of your image lighter, for adding glows and reflections. In compositing this is also the correct blendmode to apply a specular pass to an image.
Examples
The following example shows how you can create both glass and a glow with the screen layer:
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Simulating a reflection and glows with a Screen layer.
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Using Screen for a plastic wrap layer:
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Plastic wrap with a Screen layer. No erasing is needed because black leaves the image unchanged.
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Using Screen in compositing situations to apply a Reflection or Specular pass:
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Using the Screen blendmode to create computer graphics cliches.
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An alternative name for this blending mode is 'Additive' or 'Add' since it adds (in mathematical fashion) the Blend colour to the Base colour. Similar to the Screen blending mode, but the result is brighter and has more contrast..
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Linear Dodge: very much like Screen but brighter and adds more contrast.
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Like Linear Dodge, but apart from adding more contrast and brightness it also makes the colours more saturated.
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Color Dodge adds more contrast, brightness and makes the colours much more saturated.
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The Color Dodge blendmode is good for creating coloured glows. The extra contrast and brightness works well, and Color Dodge tends to show more of the Base Layer than the Screen blendmode so it doesn't look as 'washed out'.
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Color Dodge is sometimes better for creating glows than Screen since it is brighter
and leaves more of the Base Layer visible.
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Once again all the Brightening blendmodes in one image to show the differences:
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Linear Dodge has more contrast and is brighter than Screen, Color Dodge adds more saturation as well.
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Copyright 2007 - CGTextures
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