Implementing color-swap, hue-shift, saturate, negate, and pixelate effects

To begin with, let’s talk about some common operations we can do on sprites, such as inverting the colors, shifting the hue to re-colorize the image, or saturating the tint to exaggerate our colors. Then, we will discuss the technique of color-swapping for pixel-perfect sprites. And finally, we will see how to make a simple dynamic pixelation of our sprites to transform them into approximate pixel art equivalents.

Performing basic operations such as hue-shift, saturate, and negate

Because hue-shifting, saturation, and negation are such basic transformations, Unity actually has built-in Shader Graph Nodes for most of this – we will see which one corresponds to each operation.

First, we will work on our Negate shader. The point here is to invert the colors, meaning that black will become white and vice versa, but also that red will become blue, for example. Just to give you an idea, Figure...