The professional photo editor “Photoshop” has firmly entered the life of most users of a personal computer, both professionals (various photo and web studios), and an ordinary user as a desktop program that should always be on the computer. Indeed, the scope of its application is truly limitless! This is a professional retouching of photos in photo salons, restoring old and damaged photos, creating banners, cards, GIF animations.
At one time, “Photoshop” even actively created quite good site layouts. Now, of course, professionals when creating sites, or rather, their layouts, are already using other programs, specialized, but all the same company Adobe.
Photoshop Lesson: The Gradient Tool
For a beginner who wants to try himself as a Photoshop master, he will have to work hard, studying a huge library of functions. Fortunately for this on the Internet there are a huge number of different lessons, both video and text, with illustrations and step-by-step instructions. This article is not an exception, and it can be ranked as the next Photoshop lesson. And it will focus on such an instrument as gradients for Photoshop.
Wide gradients
The gradient in Photoshop is a tool with which we can set the direction of an increasing or decreasing color value in our image with a smooth transition or from transparent to color and vice versa. In fact, there are a lot of gradient options, as well as the settings of this tool.
Initially, the Photoshop program in Russian during installation already has a certain number of gradient sets, they are grouped into folders, you can change them as you wish, as well as download gradients from the Internet and create your own sets.
Creating a button using a gradient
For clarity, let's create a button for the site, make the effect of a volume button using a gradient:
- Create a new document (“File” / “Create”) and set arbitrary values for height and width.
- Then fill our working paper with some background of your choice. Create an empty layer. This is necessary so that we can move our button on the canvas and place it anywhere in the workspace.
- We take the “Rectangular Region” tool and, with the mouse button pressed, we move diagonally on the working document to draw a rectangle, you can draw a circle, a square, any figure you will work with, here, in the toolbox, there is, except for the “Rectangular Region” ", And other tools.
Using a gradient to create different effects
The drawn rectangle on your canvas will look just like a selected rectangular area. To use the tools in Photoshop - a gradient, for example - you don’t need to remove the selection, otherwise it will be applied to the entire canvas, and not just to our button.
Now activate the gradient tool and look in the upper left corner - there is a settings panel, separately for each item.
In Photoshop CS6, the button that is the most extreme on the left side is a story, here you can go to any specific step, we don’t need it here yet. And the next button is a scale. Opening it, we see the gradients for Photoshop, predefined by default.
Here a little more than a dozen standard gradients, but if you click on the gear, in this dialog box, an extended settings menu opens.
We click on the “Manage sets” item, and in the menu that opens, you can change the predefined gradients for “Photoshop” with other sets available, or upload your own that you downloaded from the Web.
You can also restore default gradients by clicking on the "Restore Gradients" menu item.
Further, you can see the gradient switching buttons: linear, radial conical, mirror. And then - the buttons of the blend mode and opacity. You can customize them at your discretion, guided by your own taste.
Silently playing with the gradient settings, choosing colors and working with style tools, you can create a voluminous interesting button.
How to download and install "Gradients" in "Photoshop"
In addition to standard sets, the mentioned tool can be found on the Internet. For example, on the training portal "Photoshop Master" there is a section "Gradients for" Photoshop "- a large collection available for download.
After you have made your choice and downloaded the archive, you need to unzip it, then go to the settings of the Gradient tool and click on “Load Gradients”. Then select the appropriate file on the computer and click "Download", after which new ones will be added to the current gradient map.