Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on creating your gradients. A Gradient if you're not familiar with it is located in the Materials Palette, you can click on the foreground or the background color to see them and then each of the Materials Properties Dialog Boxes has the Gradient Tab in the middle. That shows you the Gradients, you can click on the Down Arrow and access the different Gradients with their names, many of them are very unique, metallic, metal cooper, metal steel so forth. Some of them use the foreground or background color that you have selected. For example here's fading background, fading foreground, fading foreground into background. So if you had a blue and yellow color selected into those properties that would be blue and yellow and not black and white. All of the gradients are fine but what if you want to create your own? Not every gradient will meet your needs exactly the way you need it to. Well thankfully you can in fact and edit and save your gradients. Before I get to do that I'm going to actually do the investigatory route here and go to File Preferences, File Locations and I want to see where the gradients are and what they look like. So if I click Gradients in the File Types I can see my two locations, MY User Account on my computer in the Gradients Folder of that location and also Corel underscore 6 within the installation folder of Paint Shop Pro. So I can minimize Paint Shop Pro and go investigate those files myself and I look into Corel and of course there's 6, I can see these Gradient Files. Now their pretty small so I doubt if they're actually graphic files so if I try to open it up, no I won't open it up in Paint Shop Pro. If I try to open it up in notepad let's say no it looks some sort of binary information there so for Gradients its not something you can edit graphically or with the text editor. Let's see of we can open those up in our Script Editor, remember we're in Corel underscore 6, doesn't look like it so I've exhausted all those opportunities of doing it the hard way or doing it manually and accepting that and I will close that out and go back to the materials palette, single click to get to the Gradient Tab and simply choose a Gradient that I want to start from and let's just choose black and white since its easy to understand now choose edit. Here we have the Gradient Editor which has all the different types of gradients, in fact you can select them here, you don't need to select them from Materials Property Area to select your gradient. However I do find that its easier to select what I want to edit by its name first so I know this is black and white, I don't necessarily know if you look at the pop up tip that its Corel 6 underscore 001 OK? When I go to edit see how do I know what type that is, well I've got to keep clicking and I don't necessarily know, so, I like choosing from the Material Properties Area, that way I can save its name. So I can use this as a basis to work from and then when I'm done messing around on here click Save As and then save it as a new name. It shows up in the types and I'm good to go. I would find, I think that it's a best policy to resave them before you actually edit them so that you know you're not overwriting the existing gradient. So now that I've saved this as the new name I can drag my sliders around to create different levels of merging between dark and light here. So you can see I've got my black, my white, which is what this gradient is, its black and white and then I've got a midtone area here. I can just drag those to orient gradient how I want it to. Now these little diamonds here you can click and move those around, that pushes the blend closer to one color or another. So there's a midpoint to blending between these and that diamond identifies it. I can move it all the way over towards black or leave it towards gray. Now if I don't like that mid-color of gray I can simply drag it out and now I'm left with black and white. Drag the midpoint to establish where the gradient blends. So if I want a lot of white I can even drag the white box towards the middle so then I have a sharper gradient from black to white. I can even change the colors by clicking here and then I can also change the transparency down here. So I'm going to select Save As, I'm just going to overwrite that looks like I can't, I got to change to new name, press OK, press Close, OK and now use your flood fill tool to test it out. Now you can also use the paintbrush with gradient that works to. I tend to use the flood fill tool. Now one thing I have noticed with Paint Shop Pro and I am a big fan of it, but the gradients sometimes leave something to be desired and if you look at this, I don't think there should be able banding here but there is and sometimes that's a problem when I'm editing photos and I'm trying to apply a gradient to smoothly blend something in or remove it and I can see the banding. So be careful with gradients and sometimes you may need to edit them to try to get that banding out of there. You can export Gradients which exports it as a GRD file that way you can then share that with friends or family on the Internet or you can also then import things that people have previously created and Save It out. Now if I want to delete this, press Delete and its gone. I can also rename it let's say rename it, press OK, make additional changes, press Close, do I want to save those? Yes. Alright think I better wrap this lesson up, that's how to create your own gradients in Paint Shop Pro.