about this site

One operation, built as far down as it goes: two photographs the same size, reduced to a single frame, with every pixel of the result computed from the two underneath it.

Why so narrow

Blending is a small idea with a long tail. Twelve modes is twelve lines of arithmetic, but the questions underneath them are not small at all: whether a browser computes those lines the way the specification says, what happens to a layer that carries transparency, why the same setting gives two different midtones depending on how the numbers were encoded, how to fade one photograph into another without the edge going grey. A tool that also cropped and also resized would answer none of those, because the attention would have gone elsewhere. A tool that does only this can afford to check the browser’s arithmetic against its own on every page load, which is the sort of thing that only gets built when there is nothing else on the list.

What it will not grow into

There is a permanent limit on this build and it is worth stating outright: the second photograph is always the whole frame. It can be fitted, scaled, nudged and flipped, and it can be faded across the picture, but it will never be given a position and a boundary of its own. Free placement, a third picture, saved projects and anything that would put edges inside the frame are all refused on purpose, not deferred. Every one of them would make this tool worse at the thing it exists for, and all of them are already somebody else’s job.

How it is built

It is a static site with no server behind it: ten pages of markup, a stylesheet and a canvas. There is no account, no queue and no storage, because there is nothing to store — two files are decoded into memory, mixed in the tab, and released when it closes. The engine that does the mixing is fetched as its own chunk after the page has already drawn, so the instrument is in the HTML before any decision has been made about how it will render.

Who made it

A small independent team that builds single-purpose picture tools for the web. The intended way to pay for this one is a single advertising unit beneath the working surface, which is not running yet: the domain is still in review and no unit renders on any route today. The placement rule holds either way, and it is a rule rather than a preference — nothing above the tool and nothing inside it, because the first screen belongs to the thing you came to do.