Compositing visuals with blend modes

When you layer a Hydra oscillator over camera feedback mid-set, or stack a glow pass on a geometry layer in Resolume, the blend mode is the single decision that determines whether the composite reads as intended or turns to mud. Club visuals live and die on this: additive stacks blow out under bright content, multiply kills a dark stage wash, and picking by trial-and-error costs you bars of music. This module builds the whole skill — reading a blend mode’s per-pixel formula and predicting its look before you apply it.

The arc starts supported: begin with the core definition of blending as per-pixel math, then drill the three workhorse formulas — multiply’s darkening product, screen’s invert-multiply-invert, and additive’s clipping sum — until you can state each mode’s black/white pass-through behaviour without thinking. From there, move to the conditional and family modes: the Overlay/Hard Light commutation, Soft Light’s gentler curve, and the dodge/burn mirror-symmetry principle that lets you derive unfamiliar modes from familiar ones instead of memorising them. Difference, divide, darken/lighten-only, and the hue/saturation/color/luminosity swaps round out the vocabulary.

The capstone removes the scaffolding: one fixed pair of source layers, at least twelve rendered composites, each captioned with its formula and a concrete use in a set. Every required atom is gated by that reel — you cannot caption a mode you cannot explain, and the family atoms are what let your captions say why you would reach for one mode over its siblings. The supporting atoms enrich rather than gate: dissolve’s stochastic grain is a stylistic outlier, and the layer-versus-tool blending distinction matters for destructive-editing workflows outside the live rig.