Question

I have a button, which may be in two states: pressed and unpressed. Each state is represented by monochrome (black & white) bitmap, which can be edited in my simple editor. What I want is to to display one colorful bitmap which combines somehow those two bitmaps so that user can see all information on the one picture. How this can be achieved?

Answer 1

1. You can put them as 2 channels of a color image (e.g. using cvMerge())
2. You can add them together (properly scaled)
3. You can XOR them.
4. Try playing with Photoshop’s layer options (Multiply, screen, transparencies etc.)