I realized that I should, at least once, go whole ham--just once--and get into some real particular art nerd nonsense. And this word is something that is so esoteric that it is hidden under 2 photoshop menus but in small circles on the internet you like you will see people hootin and hollerin at the Anubis about it anyway and it's always very funny because it is an art fight that is entirely math based. Get ready for:
There was a time before I knew about Gamma Blending, and I miss it. A lot. I miss being care free and never thinking about Gamma. Gamma is part of digital art where it's just...so much math. Like you hear people say art uses a lot of math, and you just laugh it off and think "oh, they're just trying to impress people" But no, they're talking about Gamma nonsense. Which is...a confusing college level of math. I have tried multiple times to understand even this wikipedia page. I do not fully understand this wikipedia page. I was good at math growing up and I took college level calculus--I just don't have the patience to really dive into this.
The idea behind Gamma, is that it is a correction we do to make sure that colors on computers match how borked our eyes are (because eyes are bogus and see everything wrong). It's very confusing, but Gamma Blending is I think the easiest concept within Gamma to understand because it's so easy to see it's affects. Here's a video to explain it (a video that I also don't agree with but I'll get to why in a little bit. Overall the video explains it really well.)
So, tl; dr
And, yes I did do a red/green gradient right after the colorblindness post, but I did check and these colors look different even with the blindness. But, you can actually see better with colorblindness that there is a darkness in between red and green. It's a brown murky muddy color that lives there.
Unlike what the video claims--traditional painters don't care about this. This is how paint works. But graphic designers and photographers, who work with bright vivid gradients get REAL opinionated about this. They want to keep the luminosity the same within the middle part of the blend instead of it going darker (and LAB is a whole other discussion for another day--I will need to do a LAB post if I decide to keep this going.)
A lot of graphic designers fix this gamma situation through a computer script (and there's multiple you can find and download for photoshop--I didn't find any for SAI and clip, however.) And, while Photoshop does have an option to blend with gamma blending--it cannot do it with the gradient tool, as far as I know, without putting on special scripting.
It even goes deeper. There are different types of Gamma, from 1.0 to 2.2. Yes, you can change this in Photoshop, no, you cannot change this in SAI and Clip Studio. Some people are very upset about that, but honestly--does it make a difference when you can hand-blend gamma yourself instead of relying on a computer program to do it for you? I don't actually know, you tell me.
So, this is a blending method that a lot of people do to make cute kawaii pictures, and it gives them a unique signature style since it is so different from traditional blending. It's something to think about as you're blending your digital colors (even if you don't have a program that does gamma blending ((which, PS, I never use because again, it's not how traditional painting works so it does feel really weird)
But--do you ever think about luminosity of your blends? Do you think you would ever use this? And do you understand the math behind gamma? Because if you get the math, then I am all ears.