colorblend

Color blend is the process of combining two or more colors to produce a new color. In digital imaging and graphic design, blending is used to simulate painting, lighting, shading, and transparency. The term also appears as a feature name in software and hardware products, but the general concept refers to how colors interact at a pixel or layer level.

There are two broad families: additive blending and subtractive blending. Additive blending applies to light on screens (RGB): when colors are combined, light intensity adds up; for example, red and green yield yellow. Subtractive blending applies to pigments or inks (CMYK): colors absorb light, so mixing tends toward darker hues. In practice, most software uses various blending modes that remix channel values in different ways, such as normal, multiply, screen, overlay, darken, lighten, color, hue, saturation, and luminosity. Each mode defines a rule for calculating the resulting color from source and destination colors, often with an opacity parameter.

Alpha blending models transparency: the resulting color at a pixel is a weighted mix of source and destination colors using the alpha value. The common formula is result = src * alpha + dst * (1 - alpha).

Applications include photo editing, digital painting, user interface design, data visualization, and any workflow requiring layering and compositing. Color blending is highly dependent on the color space (sRGB, Adobe RGB) and gamma correction, which influence perceived results. Some software packages or plugins may refer to color blending features as ColorBlend, but the general concept remains the same across platforms.