The Work Process of Digital Imaging: Compositing

Abstract

Now that we have had some fun using plug-in filter software, which you could probably experiment with for the rest of your life, it’s time to get back into some more advanced “under the hood” thinking about how the digital image compositing pipeline works, and what it is doing in system memory. This is important if you are also going to leverage digital image compositing concepts and techniques in this book in your new media programming projects using popular widespread platforms such as Java, JavaFX, Android, or HTML5. Since I’m a programmer, I tend to think along these lines anyway, and with complex 2D and 3D software packages, knowing what is happening at the core processing level can be an advantage and help you to understand what the software tool is doing (and what it is going to do).