you did not miss anything. i'd really love support for even a few of the "popular" blending modes, like add/or/xor/and. SDL has no support for this unfortunately. if you grab numeric arrays from your images, it is not difficult to do these blending operations. but that is not always efficient.Unless I missed something, there is no support for blitting with boolean operators, as is supported by nearly all GUI systems. The only mode currently supported is "paint" mode.