For the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to replicate the Photoshop blend modes in Unity. It is no easy task; despite the advances of modern graphics hardware, the blend unit still resists being programmable and will probably remain fixed for some time. Some OpenGL ES extensions implement this functionality, but most hardware and APIs don’t. So what options do we have?
1) Backbuffer copy
A common approach is to copy the entire backbuffer before doing the blending. This is what Unity does. After that it’s trivial to implement any blending you want in shader code. The obvious problem with this approach is that you need to do a full backbuffer copy before you do the blending operation. There are certainly some possible optimizations like only copying what you need to a smaller texture of some sort, but it gets complicated once you have many objects using blend modes. You can also do just a single backbuffer copy and re-use it, but then you can’t stack different blended objects on top of each other. In Unity, this is done via a GrabPass. It is the approach used by the Blend Modes plugin.
2) Leveraging the Blend Unit
Modern GPUs have a little unit at the end of the graphics pipeline called the Output Merger. It’s the hardware responsible for getting the output of a pixel shader and blending it with the backbuffer. It’s not programmable, as to do so has quite a lot of complications (you can read about it here) so current GPUs don’t have one.
The blend mode formulas were obtained here and here. Use it as reference to compare it with what I provide. There are many other sources. One thing I’ve noticed is that provided formulas often neglect to mention that Photoshop actually uses modified formulas and clamps quantities in a different manner, especially when dealing with alpha. Gimp does the same. This is my experience recreating the Photoshop blend modes exclusively using a combination of blend unit and shaders. The first few blend modes are simple, but as we progress we’ll have to resort to more and more tricks to get what we want.
Two caveats before we start. First off, Photoshop blend modes do their blending in sRGB space, which means if you do them in linear space they will look wrong. Generally this isn’t a problem, but due to the amount of trickery we’ll be doing for these blend modes, many of the values need to go beyond the 0 – 1 range, which means we need an HDR buffer to do the calculations. Unity can do this by setting the camera to be HDR in the camera settings, and also setting Gamma for the color space in the Player Settings. This is clearly undesirable if you do your lighting calculations in linear space. In a custom engine you would probably be able to set this up in a different manner (to allow for linear lighting).
If you want to try the code out while you read ahead, download it here.
A) Darken
Formula | min(SrcColor, DstColor) | ||
Shader Output |
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Blend Unit | Min(SrcColor · One, DstColor · One) |
As alpha approaches 0, we need to tend the minimum value to DstColor, by forcing SrcColor to be the maximum possible color float3(1, 1, 1)
B) Multiply
Formula | SrcColor · DstColor | ||
Shader Output |
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Blend Unit | SrcColor · DstColor + DstColor · OneMinusSrcAlpha |