mix-blend-mode: multiply

By  on  

One of my favorite interview questions is "how do you stay current on emerging front-end techniques and APIs?"  I always get the standard "blogs" and "RSS" answers but rarely do I ever hear "from gurus on Twitter."  I find that strange because I learn loads from Twitter, especially when it comes to CSS, because a tiny snippet can do something really neat.

I had heard CSS mix-blend-mode was something awesome but this blew my mind:

Essentially, using mix-blend-mode: multiply; on an image with white background would turn that white into a level of opacity as though the image were a .png with opacity.  Whoa!  I created a demo here:

What an awesome bit of CSS!  Thanks to Wes Bos for the heads up on this nifty CSS feature!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

  • By
    HTML5 Context Menus

    One of the hidden gems within the HTML5 spec is context menus. The HTML5 context menu spec allows developers to create custom context menus for given blocks within simple menu and menuitem elements. The menu information lives right within the page so...

Discussion

  1. zakius

    you know why twitter is bad source? cause it’s just like any channel throwing everything in single place: you’ll miss many important things, twitter is meant for things that are important only in a given moment, not for sharing knowledge

  2. Florian Reuschel

    Holy moly, this is amazing. Didn’t know that’s possible at all even if I always wished for this feature.
    Well, I learn stuff like that from sites like this. Thanks! :)

  3. Heather

    I wanted to use this on a recent website I made to save the client uploading heavy PNGs. But it doesn’t work in Edge or IE so had to remove it :(

    • I usually save between 50-80% of filesize by using http://tinypng.com to optimize my pngs. You should give it a go, it works wonders.

  4. Divyateja

    Hi! Any idea of how we do it in react-native?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!