Alpha Blending and the Porter-Duff Blends
Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2010 4:32 pm
Hi!
I can't seem to get any of the Porter Duff structural blends to function. Are they platform or graphic file format dependent? The (very sparse) documentation indicates they should function on any image type with an alpha channel. I have tried them in various layer combinations, etc, and can only get them to make an image visible or invisible, with no apparent math done on layered images - note that all the images I used had alpha channels, and I had manually transferred all three datatypes - image, alpha, and mask - over, before setting blend type. The non-Porter-Duff blends all appear to work as documented.
I also discovered what may or may not be a bug or feature. If I create a group with an image and a field, setting the structural blend of the image itself has no effect using the Porter-Duff blends, but it does using the other blends - when grouped it apears the group blend setting overrides the image blend setting, but only for the Porter-Duff blends. What was puzzling was that for those blends, I had to set the blend of the group (which is not what I wanted to do). When I did so, all it did was make images in those groups using the following blends completely transparent, regardless of the blendLevel setting or layer - blendClear, blendDst, blendSrcIn, blendDstIn, blendDstOut, and blendSrcAtop. What was even more interesting, the group blend setting had no effect on the grouped text field, which appears to lend credence to this as a bug rather than a feature.
Is there some documentation on the Porter-Duff blends beyond the Dictionary, User Guide, and Developer Web pages that I missed?
Thanks,
Walt
I can't seem to get any of the Porter Duff structural blends to function. Are they platform or graphic file format dependent? The (very sparse) documentation indicates they should function on any image type with an alpha channel. I have tried them in various layer combinations, etc, and can only get them to make an image visible or invisible, with no apparent math done on layered images - note that all the images I used had alpha channels, and I had manually transferred all three datatypes - image, alpha, and mask - over, before setting blend type. The non-Porter-Duff blends all appear to work as documented.
I also discovered what may or may not be a bug or feature. If I create a group with an image and a field, setting the structural blend of the image itself has no effect using the Porter-Duff blends, but it does using the other blends - when grouped it apears the group blend setting overrides the image blend setting, but only for the Porter-Duff blends. What was puzzling was that for those blends, I had to set the blend of the group (which is not what I wanted to do). When I did so, all it did was make images in those groups using the following blends completely transparent, regardless of the blendLevel setting or layer - blendClear, blendDst, blendSrcIn, blendDstIn, blendDstOut, and blendSrcAtop. What was even more interesting, the group blend setting had no effect on the grouped text field, which appears to lend credence to this as a bug rather than a feature.
Is there some documentation on the Porter-Duff blends beyond the Dictionary, User Guide, and Developer Web pages that I missed?
Thanks,
Walt