Dégradé: a New Color Shading Tool

Abstract

Pictures or nature rarely present uniform colored regions. Most drawings include shaded and/or color shaded surfaces. Therefore for any graphic designer the color shading tool is of major importance. The tools included in a graphics library have to respect two important conditions: they have to be fast and they have to be intuitive. Most color shading tools don't conciliate these two constraints. This paper presents a new model of color shading. Its implementation uses the fastest computation techniques up-to-date. Four examples of pictures drawn with DEGRADE, the new color shading tool, are then presented.