The Gradient fill tool in Photoshop is placed on the toolbar (on the left) in a “single bundle” with the Fill bucket and is turned on with the common quick key G. It also fills the drawing with “paint”, but not with solid color, but with overflows different colors and shades with predetermined transitions from sharp boundaries to smooth, barely noticeable “flowing” of one color into another or dense coloring into a transparent layer.
Tool Settings Panel
For the bucket, the “Fill” command is provided in the “Edit” menu, where you can configure its parameters by specifying which color (or pattern) to fill in, how to deal with transparent areas, etc. And the gradient in “Photoshop” colors everything indiscriminately, however, adhering to the boundaries of the selected area, if any, but no more “conditions” are set for it.
Effect parameters, as in all other instruments, are set in the settings panel at the top. Left-clicking on the small triangle next to the thumbnail on the left (or right-clicking on the picture) opens a palette with a predefined set of standard color transitions.
This window has its own menu, which expands by clicking on the gear (or a small arrow next to it) in the upper right corner. Here you can select several more “regular” sets, sorting them out with the “Replace Gradients” command, and set the size of the thumbnails, and by default, the gradient in Photoshop performs a smooth linear transition from the first color to the second.
There are options for transitions to transparency in standard sets, but in order for them to work, you need to check the "Transparency" checkbox, otherwise the picture will be exactly flooded with one selected color.
In addition to the gradient color options, on the settings panel you can choose its shape (linear, radial, conical, mirror and diamond-shaped).
With the choice of blending mode and opacity, everything is clear, a checkmark in the "Inversion" box will build the opposite effect. We figured out the transparency, and the Dithering function, intentionally “noisy” the picture, makes the color transition more natural.
In contrast to pouring “from a bucket”, to draw a gradient, you need to turn on the tool and select the type of color transition, draw a line in the figure, thereby indicating the start and end points of the effect. After that, the program will fill the document with paints with the selected overflows and in the indicated direction.
If you draw a line with the Shift key pressed, the transition can be done strictly vertically, horizontally or at an angle of 45 degrees.
Gradient fill editor
A collection of ready-made effects is represented by ten groups of options, each of which offers from 4 to 16 colors, so the choice is quite decent. But those who do not have enough of this can not worry, because we can create the gradient in Photoshop as well.
We opened a window with sets of preset color transitions by clicking on the small arrow next to the effect thumbnail. And if you click on the thumbnail itself, the "Editor ..." opens, where, using the appropriate settings, we can create our own variations of color overflows without any restrictions.
Photoshop offers two gradient fill modes: Continuous and Noise. By default, the “Continuous” mode is set, because in most cases, wondering how to make a gradient in Photoshop, users have in mind the familiar appearance of the effect with smooth and gradual color transitions.
Building a continuous color transition
The colors are controlled by the engines (they are control points, they are markers) at the bottom of the gradient scale, and the upper sliders are responsible for the opacity. The control point is added by clicking on the corresponding border of the effect selection panel.
Clicking on the color / opacity control point activates the paint / opacity selection windows, position on the scale (%) and the "Delete" button. At the same time, on both sides of the new marker, the editor places the midpoints (rhombuses) of color / opacity, "silently" occupying the middle position between neighboring control marker points, but they can also be moved. At the midpoints of the color, the gradient in Photoshop displays equal mixtures of the initial and final colors, but midpoints of opacity are unlikely to need comments.
Colors are selected by double-clicking on a control point or on a color swatch in the "Control points" section. If the cursor is inside the gradient selection panel, it turns into a dropper, with which you can select a color on the scale or directly on the image.
The Smoothness engine controls the smooth transition between multi-colored and multi-colored stripes.
Noisy color transition
The "Noise" gradient, in contrast to the effect in continuous mode, is a random distribution of colors in the specified range of colors. Depending on the smoothness (roughness), it may look like a “normal” effect with smooth transitions (smoothness / roughness up to 30-40%) or as a variegated, thin-striped spectrum (smoothness / roughness up to 90-100%).
In addition to adjusting smoothness, when creating a transition, you can:
- choose a color model (RGB, HSB, LAB);
- limit colors (for excessively saturated colors);
- enable transparency (for random colors);
- select "Another option" (an effect is created with arbitrary color transitions, but in accordance with the specified settings).
Save the created color transition
If you plan to continue using the gradient, everything is thought out in Photoshop in this regard.
In order for a new effect to fall into one of the pre-installed (or your own) sets of standard options, you must, before approving the work of the editor (Ok), come up with a name for it and enter it in the "Name" text box, and then click the "New" button.
You can "Save" the gradient on your disk as a file with the GRD extension (Adobe Photoshop Gradient), which by default will fall into the Gradients folder in the Presets directory of your version of Adobe Photoshop. From there, new effects are extracted and loaded into the editor.
Gradient fill as style.
You can create (apply) a gradient to a drawing (or a blank canvas) in Photoshop from the Layers panel by clicking on the corresponding button in its lower part and choosing the Gradient Overlay style.
In essence and settings, this function does not differ from the color transition fill tool. True, here in the "Gradient Overlay" dialog box, you do not need to draw a line manually, and the angle is set either by the radial arrow slider or by entering a numerical value.
A "painless" gradient on the service layer
At the very beginning it was necessary to make a reservation that this effect is better to create on a separate new layer, so as not to accidentally spoil the picture itself. But for this, in addition to the usual layers, Photoshop provides service, or adjustment, layers, the list of which opens with a round black and white button at the bottom of the layers panel.
Among them there is the Gradient layer, the dialog box of which is similar to the effect window in the layer styles, where you can choose a ready-made one or build your own color transition, specify a style, choose an angle, scale, invert, apply dithering and align it with the layer.
How to use the gradient in Photoshop
You can compose verses about the irresistibility of such a coloring, and if you say it simply and briefly, it is beautiful. Therefore, it is so popular in decoration art and as a background pattern, but this effect can also be used to superimpose a tonal transition on a drawing, used as an alpha channel when creating a depth map, in combination with a layer mask, etc.