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One of the powerful reasons for using Blender is that it can do just all the steps in video production, from pre production right through post production, by itself. Although you might want to call on another product, such as an external renderer like Yafaray or an image editor such as the Gimp or Photoshop, for some specialized needs, in many cases Blender can do the job. The fewer pieces of software you have to juggle in your workflow, the better. Importing and exporting files between programs is a royal pain. Enhancing the quality of the color of images is one of these areas. When combined with Blender's composite node system, which I discussed in a basic way in a previous Youtube video, Blender can do just about everything a 2D image editor such as the Gimp or Photoshop can do.
In this tutorial, I will show how to use the Mix Node to blend two colors. This is a start to get you comfortable with tweaking 2D images entirely in Blender. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is plenty of material, just in color processing, for many more tutorials. We'll spend the entire time in the Node Editor, pretending that Blender is really Photoshop in disguise. I will use Blender 2.49b.
Steps:
1) Start up Blender. One tiny bit of housekeeping before we go into the Node Editor. Press F10 to go to the Scene buttons. Press the Do Composite button in the Anim section, telling Blender's renderer to look at the composite nodes. Change the window type to Node Editor. That's where we'll stay. There are actually three types of node editing - Material, Composite, and Texture. We want the middle icon, the one with the face, the Composite Node. Click Use Nodes. Two nodes display, the input Render Layer and the output Composite. Delete the Render Layer node - we will ignore the 3D part of Blender. To do that, select the Render Layer node (Right Click just like you're selecting an object) and press the Delete key. We still need the Composite Node, however, because that is what ultimately renders. Move the Composite Node all the way to the right by selecting and dragging it.
2) We're going to start by mixing two RGB colors. The Mix node is the most important node in color editing. To add a Mix Node, press Shift-A (the Space Bar also works), then Add - Color - Mix. Note that there are 3 sockets on the left (the top one is grey and the bottom 2 are yellow), for input into the node, and one on the right, out from the Mix node after the node does its thing.
We'll concentrate on the bottom two yellow sockets. These are what the Mix Node is going to mix. To the left of each socket is a grey rectangle, along with the word Image. The grey rectangle represents a color. The word Image means that an Image can be mixed. Actually, you can mix one image with another, an image with a color, or one color with another color. We'll start by mixing one color with another. This is not really that common, but it works well for this tutorial, to explain how the Mix Node works.
3) Click on the top rectangle. Make it red (R=1, G=0, B=0). Then click on the bottom rectangle. Make it green (R=0, G=1, B=0). Connect the output image socket of the Mix node with the input image socket of the Composite Node. Press F12 to render. The result is a big square which is a light green. What did the Mix Node do? We can find out by positioning the cursor inside the render window, holding down the left mouse button, and dragging. There's a text display of the values of the particular pixel that the mouse is over. The display shows the pixel X and Y coordinates, the RGB color values, and the Alpha value. In this case, it doesn't matter because the color is the same no matter where you click. The RGB color is reported in two notations: R=128, G=128, and B=0, or R=.5, G=.5, and B=0. One is the decimal representation, the other the Blender representation of the color. What happened is that the Mix Node mixed half of the red with half of the green.
This result is actually misleading, because one might think that this "mix" is like mixing half of the red with half of the green as a result of the Fac setting. Fac., which is set at .5, or 50%, stands for Factor. But what is it actually factoring?
Let's find out. Set Factor to 1, or 100%. Press F12 to render. Now the result is all green (R=0, G=1, B=0). There's no red in the result at all.
Now set Factor to 0. Press F12 to render. Now the result is red, with no green at all.
What's happening is that for the Mix operation, the bottom color or image acts like the foreground, and the Factor is the percentage of the foreground's pixel values (each pixel being evaluated individually) that is used. Whatever percentage is not used is used by the top color. So, when Factor is 0, none of the green is used and all of the red. When Factor is .5 green and red are used equally, and when Factor is 1, all of the green is used and none of the red.
4) Now things get even more interesting. Click on the Mix dropdown list. Mix one of 16 possible ways that one image or color can be combined with another image or color. We can't possibly cover all of these in one 10 minute tutorial. But we can get a good start. Let's look at Add. Set the Factor to .5. Press F12 to render. Now we get an entirely different result: an orange square. What did Factor do this time? Clicking and dragging on the render square tells us that the result is R=1, G=.5, and B=0, all the red and 1/2 the green.
What did Factor do this time? Set Factor to 1 and press F12 to render. Now we get yellow (R=1, G=1, and B=0).
Set Factor to 0 and press F12 to render. Now we get Red (R=1, G=0, and B=0).
What happened? No matter what the factor, we always get all of the red. However, the amount of green is dependent on the Factor. On a pixel by pixel basis, the bottom color, multiplied by the factor, is added to the top color. Since the bottom color is green, the Factor controls, in effect, the amount of green in the result, with all of the red contributing.
5) Let's look at Subtract, which works a bit differently. With the Factor set to 0, press F12 to render. The result is red.
Set the Factor to .5. Press F12 to render. The result is still red.
Set the Factor to 1. Press F12 to render. The result is still red.
What's going on? If you look closely at the render text display, you'll see that while Red = 1, G actually equals -1. That's because Subtract subtracted the green (1) from the Red's green value (0), giving -1. Set Factor to .5. G now equals -.5 and R=1. That still means a red result because any number less than zero means no green.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Experiment with the other Mix modes. In the next video, we'll look at what Mix is most commonly used for: combining two images. I hope you learned something. If you did, don't forget to hit the Subscribe button in Youtube. Happy Blendering!
