Fun With Gradients

Take a look around you for a few seconds. Drink in the colors; look how the subtle shadows blend on the edges of your monitor, or in the recesses of the room. Light to dark, blue to gray, or a sunset purple to orange to yellow horizon, we live in a world cast with gradients. Gradual tone changes give us depth perception and distinguish our world from that of cartoons. Ok, that's a stretch, but think how boring life would be in strait RGB. Let's have some fun dabbling with gradients this week. First let's take a look at our options in Photoshop, then well do a little creative applying. To begin with, you select the gradient tool from the toolbar.



With Photoshop 6 we are given a gradient Options Bar, similar to other tool selections like type, paint, etc. In the immediate left of the options bar we can select our gradient colors. You will see a gradient loaded consisting of your fore and background colors. By clicking the drop down arrow you will see several more selections become available. These are presets that shipped with the program, and actually a couple of these I use regularly.



By clicking the small arrow on the gradients drop down, you will see several options concerning the gradients, including creating new gradients, saving those you've created, or loading more that are available on your system.



The other aspect of gradients we will look at are the types of fills we can apply. This is also located in the options bar, just to the right of the gradient selection drop down.



Here you can select a strait 2 tone linear, radial, angled, reflected or diamond style fill pattern. The linear is by far the most used, as you see it in advertising all over the place. Also the radial gradient is the primary secret for those realistic globes you may have seen on various websites. Play around with all these wonderful tools, as each renders interesting results when used creatively.

Now that we've covered a few basics, let's see what the gradients can do for ...what else... TYPE! Can you tell I used to be an English major?

Ok, to demonstrate the dynamics possible with gradients we are going to start with a new image, black background. Create a new layer and enter some large type (100 points or larger) using the type mask tool. Let's use a red foreground, white background, and fill the type selection from bottom to top. For this example I'm using a free font I found online called 'Viper Squadron'. Here's where I'm at thus far:



You will note in the example I do not have the selection active... I did this just so you could see the type better. Your selection should be active still.

Create a new layer and place it beneath the type layer. Select>Modify>Expand by 2, and fill the selection in the empty layer with the gradient again, this time going from top to bottom.



I'm not going to use the bevel options to dress it up this week... instead, let's create a new layer beneath those 2. Again, fill this from bottom to top. Select>Modify>Contract by 2, then delete the selection. Select>Inverse, and let's run a motion blur filter on this layer.



Not too bad! I love this effect... it can look like the text is moving to some, but to me it gives the illusion of being on lined paper for some reason. Here's mine: