Hey all,
I’m currently struggling with the way Blender mixes colors. Painting pure red on a green background makes the transition fade from red to some sort of murky dark color to green. The same thing in photoshop does not add any dark colors in between.
Anyone know if there’s a workaround for this?
This is how the transitions look in Blender. Note the dark color between the different colors.
This is how I would expect it to work and how it works in Photoshop.
Photoshop
Mix 100% red + 100% green = 50% red + 50% green = green/khaki
Normal blend mode in photoshop. Did you just paint on top with a soft brush? Additive colors shouldn’t make it darker like Blender does. The falloff seems to make the colors darker instead of just applying less of the color.
Photoshop.
Red background. Painted green on top with 100% opacity.
Blender
Red background. Painted green on top with 100% strength.
Yes, exactly that JA12. I’ve seen the video before. So is Blender just a bit…lacking in this area or is there any way to correct it?
But if you take out your physical paint, and mix green and red you will get a brown. Painting into the same layer seems to me to require that mixing, whereas painting onto different layers eliminates it.
Painting with paint colors is not an additive but a subtractive process so they’re going to blend differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color
The way colors are mixed in Photoshop or Blender is an additive mix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_color
And yeah I noticed having different colors on different layers does avoid that problem but it is quite a pain to paint the splatmaps like that. Oh welp I guess I’m out of options.
How does Krita handle it? I haven’t really worked much with color there - I paint greyscale first for value, and then use Color, Overlay, Softlight, etc. to misx the colors into the value painting in a more Flemish style. When I use mix mode, I generally expect the darkening to happen there as if I am working with wet paint.
If you need just solid splats, paint them in black and white and use that as a stencil if you are using them in your material - much better result I think.
What I get from the video JA12 linked to is that this is a linear workflow/gamma correction issue. Did you try “forcing” Blender into staying linear by painting into a texture with 32 bit color depth?
And btw, what you’re showing in your Photoshop screenshots is afaik not Photoshop’s default behaviour (at least not in CS6). To get the result you want, you’d need to go to Color Settings > Advanced and check Blend RGB Colors Using Gamma 1.0, otherwise it will look exactly as in Blender.
Good to know, ikarishinji, that explains a lot - thank you!
Krita has the same behavior. Create an image in 8-bit RGB color and paint a red background with soft green over it. It’ll darken in the blend. Convert the image to 32-bit and paint with the same brush and it behaves like Blender’s 32-bit image. However, converting to 32-bit will not fix the dark blend from a single-layer blend. Converting down during saving keeps the proper mixing colors from both layered and single-layer blending. I was looking for a setting in Krita similar to the gamma blend setting in Photoshop, but I couldn’t find one. I guess I’ll be painting in 32-bit linear images, then.
Thanks a lot IkariShinji! Painting in 32 bit solves my problem and I’m finally able to use this without issue. Your help is very much appreciated! 
And yeah you’re probably right, I’ve changed the color blending settings in Photoshop at some point I think.
