Adobe Photoshop 7 Tutorials
Working with Color / Gradient Editor
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop 7 / Working with Color / Gradient Editor)
As I mentioned, of course you can always use any of the preset gradients. All I need to do is go up and click on this little downward pointing triangle to select from any of these presets, and it will popup this popup palette of preset gradients. If I click right on the gradient preview thumbnail here, it will bring up the gradient editor, and this way I can construct my own custom gradient. In the top section of my gradient editor of course is the same collection of preset gradient swatches. Well I'm going to go ahead and create a custom new gradient, and I'm just going to give it a name, I'm going to call this one - cow green/brown. And the gradient type - it is going to be a solid gradient. And what are these various little buttons down here? These are called color stops, and these color stops are attached to my current gradient, which in this case was based on my foreground and background color. Notice, I have a color stop at the top and one at the bottom. Well one controls the actual color and also notice that in this case there is a small foreground/background color icon, indicating that right now my colors are based on the foreground and background colors. Well what I can do of course is select the color stop, and double click on it and it will bring up a color picker. And this way I can go and choose a new color for this end of my gradient. I'll say ok to that. And to the same extent, I can go and double click on this color stop as well, and choose a different color for that end of my gradient. The stops at the top control the opacity of these color stops. So I can click right on this particular opacity stop, and notice when I do that, my opacity value becomes highlighted. Which means I can just type in a value here. And notice when I type in, in this case 50% opacity, this end of my gradient becomes 50% opaque. Gradating to 100% opaque down here. I could also press and hold on the popup slider, and choose a different opacity value by sliding the popup slider to a different value down here. I could also move the opacity stop by clicking and dragging on the stop to a new position. And notice my value for location in this case is a % value, indicating what % along my gradient that this transparency or opacity stop is being positioned to. This is the mid-point stop and I can reposition where I want my colors to transition. So choose the mid-point stop underneath for where we want the colors to transition, or if we have a different value for opacity here, I am going to turn this down to say 10%, I can have the opacity transition in this way. I'm going to turn that back up so that both of my stops are to 100%, and what I'm going to do is add another color. And all I need to do is click once underneath the gradient and it will add another color stop. And of course, I can double click on the actual color stop icon there and choose a new color. Or another option I have is to click on the color swatch here, and it will bring up the color picker. Notice that whichever stop that you are editing has a black triangle. So whichever stop I click on, is the one I'm editing and it has a black triangle indicator next to the actual color box, or the transparency box. So if I click on this particular icon, I'd be editing my transparency stop right here. And I know that I'm editing that, because it has a black triangle and the rest have the gray triangle. Well how do we get rid of a color stop or a transparency stop? All I need to do is drag it out. So I just dragged it away from the gradient itself, or if I have one selected, I could also press the delete button and it will be deleted from the gradient. I'm going to add another opacity stop here, and turn this one way down, and I'll just click new, and when I click new it's been added to my collection of preset gradient swatches. Well another way I like to create a gradient, is to select the color stop and move into my document, and notice when my cursor moves into the document, it turns into a color picker. So in this way I can go ahead and sample a color here, so I'll sample my green. So I've sampled that for my this end of my gradient, and I'll go ahead and click this color stop, and I'll sample a brown from this cow. And there's my new green-brown cow gradient. So I'll call it 'cow green/brown' and click new. Finally you can also create a noise type of gradient, choose noise, and it brings up this collection of controls. We can choose from different color models - RGB, HSB or LAB. We go back to RGB, and notice that we also have this slider for roughness. So at a low value for roughness, we get a very smooth type of gradient. And if we increase our roughness, we get a very rough looking gradient. We can choose to restrict the colors. And notice if we restrict colors it will look to the values in between these two sliders along these various parameters. In this case red, green and blue. And we could also choose to add transparency. And one of my favorite things to do is to click randomize. Choose randomize - it will generate different gradients based on your parameters set for color models
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop 7 |
| Author: | Andrew J. Hathaway |
| SKU: | 33329 |
| ISBN: | 1889347272 |
| Release Date: | 2002-09-05 |
| Duration: | 11 hrs / 152 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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