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If
you Prefer it Dark...
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The original we started from was a pretty light colored image. What if
we wanted it to be more of a dark, night-time mood?
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Before doing all the steps from prior sections of this tutorial, even
before creating the animation and throwing snowflakes at it, we could
have used this filter: Day for Night
This filter sort of trades day for night, making it all darker and
reducing color saturation. Perhaps also adding a slight blueish tint.
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You can apply the filter several times. It gets darker with each
application
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Of course, if you already did create the animation or started from a
movie, you'll want to apply Day for Night filters to all frames,
through the Timeline editor:
Click the [Render] button a few times until it's the right amount of
darkness you want.
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Turning
on the Lights in the House
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At night, additional
mood can be conveyed by showing life in the house, or more precisely:
showing light!
 Select
the area in one of the windows. For example the left-side window
on this image.
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Once you have select the pixels belonging to that window, there are
several ways to turn on the light in there.
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Select the desired color, such as light yellow. Use the right mouse
button to make it the secondary color.
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 Then
right-click on the [X] (CLEAR) tool, and select "Clear selected to
secondary"
This clears the window to gright yellow.
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After that you may want to clear the
alpha, but first be sure to store a snapshot
of it just in case you need it again:
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Here's the result, with Alpha turned off so we don't get distracted by
the marching ants. Note that you could also have disabled alpha, i.e.
no need to really clear alpha if you just temporarily want to turn it
off.
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However, this is just one of many frames. And we're not going to have
the patience to do this again and again for each frame. We will want
instead to use a trick from the timeline editor to clear or combine the
original pixels with the bright yellow color across all frames.
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Combining
with Swap
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Dogwaffle has two
image buffers: the main one containing your image(s), and a single swap
buffer which you could think of as being the back side of the canvas.
It's able to contain another image. We'll use it to contain the bright
yellow light which we want to get into the window area. Once we've got
the bright yellow in the swap buffer, we can go back to the Timeline
editor and combine the bright yellow pixels with the pixels of the
window from the main image buffer, across all frames.
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Switch to the Swap buffer, i.e. swap the two buffers with the 'j'
(jump) shortcut or from the Image buffer menu:
Image
> Swap buffers (j)
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 Using the alpha channel's selection, clear the window
content to the desired color.
We could leave the rest around it nlack, if we were going to 'add' the
swap buffer's colors to the main buffer colors. But we may try other
tricks, affecting only the pixels inside the alpha mask. So we can
ignore what color it actually is. outside of the selection.
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Now jump back to the Main buffer, and go to the Timeline editor.
In the Timeline editor, scroll down to the group of filters entitled "Combine with swap"
Click a few or all of them to see their effect. Some will combine to a
nice bright yellow lighting in the window.
Some may simply replace the pixels in the window. But other modes might
show more of the original details still partly visible. For example if
you have a dark, wooden cross frame in the middle of that window, you'd
expect it to get a little brighter but not disappear in the floodlight.
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If the effect of the chosen combination is too intense, i.e. too bright
a window resulting from it and too much contracts showing in the
resulting preview, then you could adjust the alpha mask to dim the
resulting combination.
Use Alpha > Adjust alpha...
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reduce the 'Value' slider, perhaps to half its original value. The
greyscale representation of the alpha mask turns the window selection
from white to a mid grey.
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and here's the result in the Timeline editor with less contracts in the
preview.
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You can render it more than once too.
Another good filter for this misty cold nightly scene is to use the
light diffusion filter in the Timeline editor
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| next: shining
some
light from the window (coming soon) |
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