Manual Image Blending/Transparency
Real-time transparency has become so commonplace in modern games and PC applications that it’s almost taken for granted. However, the specific formula that performs this now-ubiquitous effect is worth understanding.
Transparency is simply a weighted average between the color values of two pixels. As an example, consider the following two colors:
RGB(255, 0, 0)
RGB(0, 0, 255)
At 50% transparency - or a pure blending between these two colors - we simply add the individual color amounts together and divide by two. This gives us a new color -
RGB(127, 0, 127)
The sample app provides a slider for variable transparency, which uses a slightly more complicated formula. (Each input color is weighted according to the desired level of transparency.)
As you’d expect, your programming language probably provides a built-in function for blending images, which is likely much faster than manually blending each pixel. However, if you need to blend values manually, this is how you do it.