Blend Mode Preview

I REALLY wanted to name this "Blender," but that would have made branding difficult, for obvious reasons.

Ever wanted to figure out what blend mode you should use? Or just to see how different blend modes play with each other without having to whip up a test program? Fear not, for I have made a test program!

Features

You can load images into the program, and see how they look with various blend modes. There are four basic blend modes available:

• Normal
• Additive
• Subtractive
• Max

Or alternatively, eleven source-destination ("extended") blend modes, which you would set two of:

• Zero
• One
• Source Color
• Inverse Source Color
• Source Alpha
• Inverse Source Alpha
• Destination Alpha
• Inverse Destination Alpha
• Destination Color
• Inverse Destination Color
• Source Alpha Saturation

If you're really feeling hardcore, you can also play with the blending equation.

• Additive (src + dst: the default)
• Subtractive (src - dst)
• Inverse subtractive (dst - src)
• Min (min(src, dst))
• Max (max(src, dst))

You can load in as many image layers as you want, each with their own blend mode and blend equation. In addition to having their images and blend modes set, layers can be renamed, enabled and disabled, scaled, and moved around. Click to drag the selected layer's image in the preview window around, or resize them by clicking on the edges. (The cursor should change when you mouse over the appropriate parts of the image.)

You can load an image by clicking the button, or by dragging one into the program window. Be sure to select the layer you want to target first!

If you want to, you can also save the preview image directly to a file. (Layer borders and the mouse cursor will not be included.) This is limited to the 540x540 preview area.

If you don't want to see the checkerboarded background, click the "opaque" toggle to use a background color instead.

Notes

• These are blend modes as you'd find them in a computer graphics API, rather than in an image manipulation tool like Photoshop. Many of the Photoshop blend modes can be emulated using a combination of the extended blend modes, although some of them require special shaders. I may implement something like Photoshop blend modes in the future, depending on how much more I feel like doing with this tool.
• This was made in GameMaker 2024.4.
• The UI is one of the other GameMaker extensions I've made. You can use it if you want. It makes writing software like this in GameMaker very easy. This tool was put together from start to finish in about less than five hours.

Price

As usual, the asset is free as-is. I'll fix simple or game-breaking bugs but more involved support requires payment via either Itch or Patreon.  I get the final say in what constitutes "game-breaking."

Credits

• The duckling sprite, dog sprite, and background seen in the preview screenshots were created by @alemunin
• The emu sprite seen in the preview screenshots was created by @gart_gh
  
• Scribble is a text renderer by @jujuadams
• The program icon is "blend" by Adnen Kadri from the Noun Project