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Gradients allow you to create smooth transitions from one color into another color and what you can do with this tool is create all kinds of cool effects. In this image here, what I can do is make a nice, hazy summer feel. So right now it looks like a nice clear day. I'm going to add some haze using the colors in this image. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my eyedropper tool and I'm going to click on the blue portion of the sky here. I'm going to click on my gradient tool, which is located right here and I'm going to choose this little drop-down arrow to go to my gradient picker. Now as you see here, I have some options. I can use some of the standard gradients that come with Photoshop, or I can choose the foreground color to the background color or I can choose this one which we're going to use here, which is foreground to transparency. Which I use pretty much often, so I'm going to grab that one and I'm going to go to my image and watch this. I'm going to click and drag my mouse. Now, where you let go of that mouse and where you start clicking is going to determine the origin and the ending point of your gradient. So I'm going to go ahead and let go of the mouse and just see where we have some nice haze. I'm going to undo that and show you something else. I can also reduce the opacity of that haze and change the blending mode. So I'm going to leave it on normal for now. This time I'm going to click in the middle of this tree and I'm going to let go of my mouse right here. 00:01:04 ] And you see that? We have a nice haze showing up? The cool thing about the gradient tool is I can keep reapplying it so I can go up here, add some of that haze, over here, and just add that haze all throughout this image to make this day look very sweltery and very hot. If you mess up, just go to file revert or, of course, what you can do is go to edit and step backwards a couple times. In this case, I'm going to simply revert. Now let's talk about how to make your own gradient. And before I do that, by the way, I'm just going to show you, you have also options up here. We can go from a linear gradient, you can go to radial, we have some other shapes as well. So you can determine how the gradient is going to be drawn out. Now let's talk about how to make a gradient. I'm going to go to the file menu, I'll choose new document and I'll just make anything. To make my own, custom gradient, I'm going to click not on the drop down arrow, but on this bar here, this opens up the gradient editor and I can choose any of the presets here to start my gradient. So let's say I want to make some metal. What I can do is add some more of these guys down here.These little boxes are called color stops. So I can click here to make my own color stop and as you see, it applies the color that's already selected. If I want to change that color, just double click on this swatch here, a little stop, change the color to something else and wallah, there you go. And over here I do the same thing. I double click on the black one. I can change the color to blue and that changes the color stop completely. So it's kind of cool. I can also click on the color stop and move it to reposition where it's located on this bar. If I don't want a color stop, I click and drag it off the bar completely like so. And now it's gone. I can add as many as I want and I can double click once again to change the color of each one of those guys individually until I'm happy with the gradient that I'm working on. Once again, I can, I can make it any color, so I can make this one this color and so on. And what I can also do is I can move this guy here. This pretty much changes how harsh or smooth the gradient is going to be from one stop to the other. So you can get a very harsh line or a very smooth gradient in between there. So that's the location between the two here. And I can change the smoothness value. I can also, once again, change how the gradient is going to work. Now I'm going to name this green and I'm going to save it. It's going to go into the gradients folder automatically. I'll name it green, save it and then I'll click OK.
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |