Using brightness, saturation, and contrast with screen effects

Now that we have our screen effects system up and running, we can explore how to create more involved pixel operations to perform some of the more common screen effects found in games today.

Using a screen effect to adjust the overall final colors of your game is crucial in giving artists global control over the final look of the game. Techniques such as color-adjustment sliders allow users to adjust the intensity of the reds, blues, and greens of the final rendered game. This concept is also used with techniques such as putting a certain tone of color over the whole screen, as seen in something such as a sepia film effect.

For this particular recipe, we are going to cover some of the more core color-adjustment operations we can perform on an image. These are brightness, saturation, and contrast. Learning how to code these color adjustments gives us a nice base from which we can learn the art of screen effects.

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