Is there an easy way to blend two System.Drawing.Color values?

Question

Is there an easy way to blend two System.Drawing.Color values? Or do I have to write my own method to take in two colors and combine them?

If I do, how might one go about that?

Answer 1

If you want to blend colours in a way that looks more natural to the human eye, you should consider working in a different colour space to RGB, such as L*a*b*, HSL, HSB.

There a great code project article on colour spaces with examples in C#.

You may like to work with L*a*b*, as it was designed to linearise the perception of color differences and should therefore produce elegant gradients.

Answer 2

I am not entirely sure what you're trying to do with blending, but you could look into alpha blending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_compositing.

Answer 3

I think its easier to blend an array of colors, in case you want to blend more then 2 Here is my function:

private Color colorBlend(List<Color> clrArr)
{   
    int r = 0;
    int g = 0;
    int b = 0;
    foreach(Color color in clrArr)
    {
        r += color.R;
        g += color.G;
        b += color.B;
    }
    r = r / clrArr.Count;
    g = g / clrArr.Count;
    b = b / clrArr.Count;
    return Color.FromArgb(r, g, b);
}

The array must be as a List of color Use :

List<Color> colorList = new List<Color>();
colorList.Add(Color.Red);
colorList.Add(Color.Blue);
picturebox.backColor = colorBlend(colorList);