On Crossfading Properly

Since Adobe Revel just replicated the thing Google+ did, and they're both wrong, I thought I would say this:

If you have two images over a black background and you want to crossfade between them, please DO NOT fade out the first one as you fade in the second.

(Exception: you can fade the first one out, quickly, at the very end of your animation, if the aspect ratios are different.)

The reason is this: in the middle of your animation, if you do it the Google+/Adobe way, you will have:
 - image A at 50%
 - image B at 50%
=============
Total opacity: 75%

And you didn't really mean to have 25% of the background showing through there, did you?

Crossfading between two images this way will leave you with a 25% darker image in the middle of your very fast crossfade, and that's very distracting and looks bad.

You don't want intensity to change in a crossfade, unless it's very slow and fades to black on purpose.

No comments:

Post a Comment