Looks like I’ve been using the Gradient and Gaussian Blur nodes in all the previous posts. This one, therefore, is the logical combination: masking a linear light blur with a gradient. I promise to write about something that doesn’t involve blurs and gradients next time…
Let’s take another random boring image from my snapshot archive:
In 30 years, this locomotive is automatically going to look quaint. But we can’t wait, we want sappy nostalgia today. So bring on the Conduit Digital Aspartam Coating — good for your teeth, unbearably sweet, with unknown side effects due to prolonged exposure:
Looking on the right, where the input image comes in, we see two different processing paths: one with Levels/Channel Mixer/Gaussian Blur, while the other has Levels/Saturation/Multiply. These are then combined using an Over node. The Over node does regular alpha (=transparency) compositing — same thing as the Photoshop “normal” blending mode.
In this case, the top image doesn’t have an alpha channel, so Over gets the alpha from the node’s middle input. The cyan color indicates that this is a scalar input: you can’t connect a color into it, it has to be a plain number value. Because the value I wanted to use for alpha is a color generated by the Gradient node, I had to add a Scalar node to handle the conversion explicitly. (Scalar is a convenience node that simply takes the red channel from the original image; if you actually want the image’s brightness, you should use a Luminance node.)
Between Gradient and Scalar, there’s a Bezier Curve node. I’ll probably make another post about the curve nodes later, so for now, I’ll just show pictures of what this node is doing here. The original gradient is on the left, in the middle is the curve specified for the node, and on the right, the result:
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Going back to the right-hand side of the conduit again, there’s a few different color correction nodes applied to both processing paths of the image. On the blur side, there’s a Channel Mixer, which is used to give the image a bluish tone. On the non-blurred side, there’s Saturation and Multiply with a yellow color for that sunset atmosphere. The blurred image is also heavily darkened; that’s why there are two separate Levels nodes (the tone modification applied on the non-blurred side is much more modest).
Maybe this conduit would be more useful if the gradient were vertical instead of horizontal. That’s easy to change in the Gradient node. Let’s try it on another image:
The blur looks rather lumpy here, but I don’t mind — I just wish it were summer… Well, Merry Christmas! As a modest present, here’s the .conduit file for this effect.
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