Creating and Using Gradients in Photoshop Elements

1. Intro to Creating and Using Gradients in Photoshop Elements: Hi, I'm kidding Newbold. I'll be your instructor in this class using gradients in Photoshop Elements. I've been working with Photoshop since the early 1990s and want to share some of the tips and tricks and techniques that I've learned along the way. This class is designed for beginners, but we'll be getting into some advanced techniques as we work with these gradients. This class is good for beginners and advanced alike. By the end of this class, you should be able to use gradients in a variety of ways to help improve your artwork and your designs. Let's take a look at some of the things we'll be looking at in this class. In this course, we will talk about the gradient tool and the options available. Many gradients come standard in Photoshop Elements. We will go over the different types of gradients, linear, radial, angle, reflected diamond. We will cover transparency and how that reacts differently with the gradients. We will go over the gradient, fill adjustment layers, and all the options available there. Then we will learn how to edit gradients or create new gradients using the gradient editor. We will go over how to create a noise gradient which gives us random lines. We will go over how to use the noise gradient as a background. We will create a gradient border using the selection tools. Put a gradient in type and put a gradient Danish shape. I'm excited to teach this class. Photoshop is a powerful program and you can do so many things with it to improve your artwork and your designs. Let's get started. In the first lesson, I'll see you there. 2. Using the Gradient Tool: Before we start to work with the gradient tool, I want to make sure that you're in expert mode. You don't want a being quick. Quick mode is very basic and it doesn't even have a gradient tool. Make sure you're in the expert mode. Another thing I like to have my Layers panel visible all the time. Your workspace may look more like this and that's fine, especially if you're working on a laptop or a smaller screen, don't have a lot of screen real estate to use. I like to have my Layers panel visible all time because I use it all the time. In order to make that visible camera here under More. Click on this little triangle and select custom workspace that puts all those panels that were down here, up here in tabs. You can grab your layers panel and just drag it out. Now your layers panel will be visible all the time and you're others are up here in the tabs. Let's get into gradients. This is your gradient tool. When you click on the gradient to a lid opens up all these options down here at the bottom. If you click on this gradient or on the word edit, it'll open up the gradient editor. We'll get into that in a later class. Click on this arrow next to the gradient and it'll open up all your gradients. This is a pull-down menu that has different categories of gradients. We'll just leave it for now on default. If you hover over these gradients, it'll tell you what it is, is foreground or background for granted, transparent, black to white. And then you've got these alleys, different gradients. We'll just use our foreground background. Draw a gradient, just clicking and artwork. Hold down the mouse button and drag that when you release the mouse button, that's your beginning point you for grant that any point your background, the length of that line will determine your transitionary if you have a very short line and the transition will be very short. If you have a long line, the transition will be longer. Let's zoom out command and the minus key on a Mac or Control and the minus key on a PC. And you can even start out here and drag your gradient. Get it the way you want it. In every time you drag a gradient, it just replaces the gradient that you had. You see over here in your background panel. How it just replaces what you had fit in the window Command 0 or Control 0. If you're on a PC, you will fit that in the window. If you want to draw a perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical at 45 degree angles, hold down the Shift as you drag. See if I click and hold down the mouse button and I drag, you can move that gradient around. And it'll go at any angle that you want. But if you wanted to perfectly, perfectly horizontal or vertical, hold down the Shift. And you can see it goes at 45 degree angles. You can just hold it and bring it down and it'll be perfectly horizontal. You can drag from the side and your gradient will be perfectly vertical, art 45-degree angles. These are your blend modes and we're not going to cover the blend modes in this course. That's another course I wanted to own. They can be pretty confusing and complicated, so we'll leave that for another time. This is the reverse button. So if you click on that, that reverses the gradients. For example, we were going foreground to background. Now we're going background to foreground, white to black. These are your different gradients. You can see we've been using this gradient, which is the linear gradient. This is your radial gradient. You click on that. It'll draw a circle gradient. You can see we went from foreground to background, black to white. Here's where we can reverse it. Now it'll go from white to black and create a nice vignette in there. This is the angle gradient. It creates a gradient in a clockwise position. You'd draw it from the center out. We still have our reverse button checked, so it went from the background to the foreground anti-clockwise rotation. Let's uncheck that reverse bend. So we go from foreground to background. And let's drag from the middle up. Now we're going from the foreground to the background, white in a clockwise direction. This is the reflected gradient. Click and drag. It'll make your gradient here. There. It also reflects it up there. You can drag that anywhere you want. This is the diamond gradient and it's a lot like the radial gradient. You drive from the center out and it creates a diamond or a star shape. Let's fill that layer with white. Let's start with a clean slate. Shift Delete or shift backspace on a PC will bring up the fill layer dialog box and we'll just select white, fill that with white. Let's look at transparency. We're going to use a type layers, get the type tool. I'll just type something in here. Let's go back to the gradient tool and we'll select the foreground to transparent gradient tool. Make sure transparency is checked. Click and drag. I got an error because it's trying to put that gradient on our type layer. Let's cancel that and let's make a new layer to put our gradient. Click and drag. Hold down the Shift. You can see that's transparent. Now we still have this one, the diamond gradient selected. And that's okay. Because our transparency box is checked every time we draw a gradient, it doesn't replace it like it did before. It just adds it to the gradient that's already on there. You can build up some different things. Let's change the color. Click on the foreground color and it'll open the color picker. I can read. If you turn this transparency off, you can see it becomes a solid color. That's because we're using the foreground to transparent gradient. That won't happen. If you use one or the other gradient, just with the transparent gradient. Have to have this transparency checked. You going to use the transparency. You can also use the opacity slider now change the opacity of your gradient. The opacity slider will work with any of the gradients as long as you have the transparency checkbox checked. Let's change our foreground color to a blue color under a couple of more up here. You play around with it and make all kinds of different effects. Let's pull out our opacity slider backup. Sometimes integrating that you'll see lines that show up in a transition that's called banding. Dinner adds digital noise to your gradient and makes those transitions a lot smoother. So it's best to have dither checked all the time. Problem with using the gradient tool is that once the grade needs is drawn, you can't modify it at all. In our next lesson, we'll go over the gradient fill layer, which is a much better way to make your gradient. I'll see you there. Thanks, Bye. 3. How to Use a Gradient Fill Layer: The last lesson we talked about the gradient tool, which is found over here in the Tools Panel. In this lesson, we're going to talk about a better way to make a gradient. And that's by using an adjustment layer. And this is the Adjustment Layer icon right here. And if we click on that drop-down menu comes up and we can click on gradient, which creates a gradient fill adjustment layer. And it opens up this gradient fill dialog box. To pick our gradient, we can click on this arrow right here by the side of the gradient. And it opens up the gradient picker, which is the same gradient picker that we saw on our, on our last lesson. We went through the gradient tool. This dropdown menu. Let's just select from several different categories of gradients that are available. In Photoshop Elements. We're just going to stick with the default. Let's pick this gradient right here. Just click anywhere off to the side to close that gradient picker. This pull-down menus where you can choose the type of gradient that you want. Linear, radial angle, reflected diamond. We went through those in the last lesson when we talked about the gradient tool and they're exactly the same here. So we're not going to spend any time talking about those. This is where you can control the angle of your gradient and you can just click on this line and drag it around this circle. And the angle of your gradient will change. You can also just type in a number here. 90 will make your gradient straight just as if you use the Shift key when you do your gradient. Scale controls the transition of the gradient, just like when you are using the gradient tool, if you drew a small line of, that transition was very small. If you drew it long line, the transitions longer. If you just hover over the word scale, you'll see a little hand with an arrow or two-headed arrow. If you just click and then drag to the left, makes the number smaller, it makes the transition smaller. To the right, makes the numbers larger and the transition larger. You can also use this arrow right here. Click on that and you get a slider, which you can use to slide back and forth to change. It, can also type of number in there. 100 means the gradient goes from the top to the bottom. You also have reverse, which we talked about in the last lesson. You also have dither, which I don't know why I did not check my default, but we'll check that line was layer is a little bit different. Alignments layer when you draw gradient, it aligns with the bounding box of layer. Now the layer that this one is aligning with is the entire canvas. It's going from the top to the bottom. Let's just click Okay on that. I want to show you one more thing. If we draw a marquee here now we have a square. Let's make a new adjustment layer. You'll see where because I had that Marquis active, it automatically gave me a Layer Mask here. There's r-square right there. Now the square is the bounding box. On that layer. You can see that the gradient came in on that banding box. Let's get the same gradient. Now you can see the bounding boxes that square, and it drew the gradient from the top of that square to the bottom of that square. Now if you uncheck the alignment layer button, now, it looks like it disappeared, but it didn't disappear. Let's click Okay there. Let's turn the visibility of that layer off. The gradient is still there, the box is still there. But now because we uncheck that align with layer checkbox, Photoshop is drawing that gradient, aligning it with the bounding box, this layer, which is the top of the canvas to the bottom of the canvas. And that's why you can't really see it there, because it's just over the top of the other one in the exact same spot. If we click that back on and click on, align with layer again. Now it's aligning with the bounding box of this layer and not the bounding box of that layer. That's the end of this lesson on the gradient fill adjustment layer. On our next lesson, we're going to actually go in and edit a gradient and make our own gradient and save it so that we can use it in the future. Thanks for joining me in this class. We will see on the next one. 4. How to Use the Gradient Editor: In our last lesson, we went over the gradient fill adjustment layers that's found here under the Adjustment Layer icon, gradient. And it opens up this gradient fill dialogue box. We went over all of these different options in our last lesson. In this lesson, we're going to go over the gradient editor. To get to the gradient editor, just click on the gradient and it opens the gradient editor. Now here's where you can edit your gradients. You can create new gradients. You can change the opacity of the gradients. Let's start by picking a different gradient because this one goes to transparent. We don't want that one to show you how it works. We'll go with one that doesn't have the transparency in it. This one, you can see that the gradient here is the same as the gradient here. Blue, red, yellow, blue radio. Now you can change the gradient. These right here are called color stops. If you select one, this triangle, the top turns black, that means that that's selected and you can grab that and just move it. You can drag it around. And as it changes your gradient here, it changes your gradient over here also, you can see exactly what you're doing. You can drag it back. Let's drag it all the way over here and you can see what it's doing to the gradient. Let's put it right back in the middle. 50% is right in the middle. You can also type in the values right here if you want these little diamonds, the color midpoint. So that's the exact midpoint between the blue and the red. And you can also drag those around. Just take it up a little bit and you can see what it's doing to the gradient. Those are also 50%, that's 50% between the blue and the red. And if you wanted to change this one over here, just click back on this color stop and you'll have both of them there. Now to add a color, you can just click. And it adds another stop in there to change the color. Once that selected, and you got that little triangle that's black. Click on your color right here. And it opens the color picker and we can pick a color. Let's just pick one of these pink colors. Yeah, like that. Now you can see we've added that color into our gradient. Again, you can move that around if you want. I can slide this down a little bit, down a little bit. And we can, can customize this gradient anyway that you want to get rid of one of those color stops. Just click on it and drag it. You can click on it to select it and just hit the garbage can over here. Now, now it's gone. So to get it back, we'll just click right here in the middle. And it actually added the red back in there. It goes. Let's put that at 50. These stops on the top, those are the transparency or the opacity. If you click on that to select it again, you get the little triangle that's black. You can just hover over the word opacity and drag. You see the numbers going down. You can see that it's getting more transparent up there. Take it all the way down. And now the whites actually shown through, the white of this background is actually showing through. Those are the opacity stops. You can add some in there, just like you can the color and change the opacity in the middle. Now you can go from opaque to transparent to opaque. To get rid of it. Let's put that back in a 100. Just drag it off again, just like you did the colors. Now let's make our own, our own gradient. Let's go ahead and add that magenta color back in like we had before. That in there. Let's put something else over here to let's put in, let's put in a green. Now, we're gonna go from blue to magenta to red to green to yellow. Let's move this down a little bit. You can adjust these, just select it and you can see. Where are these? Midpoint stops our slide that down a little bit more stringing, see more yellow at the top. Just that a little bit more. Let's say that's what we like. We like that. We want to save that as our own gradient. Right here's a custom name. You can name it, will just name it. Custom gradient. Now to save that, you've just click this Add to preset. You add that to the preset. Now it's there and if you hover over it, you'll be able to see our name, our custom gradient. Let's click Okay on that. Let's go ahead and cancel that. And we'll just go back into our gradient fill adjustment layer. If you click on this little arrow right here that shows all of our gradients and there it is, right there. If you hover over it, you can see our custom gradient. And there it is. We've saved that gradient and we can use it over and over and over again. Let's go back into the gradient editor. Let's just get out of that. Let's get into that o to delete a gradient after you've made it. Just right-click. Or if you're on a Mac or Control click here, you can rename it or delete it, and we'll just delete it. Now so far we've been using this solid type. There's another type hear this called noise. Noise is a little different. You can see here what it looks like. It's a little different than, than the regular gradient. And you've got these controls that can change the color. You just need to kind of play around with them a little bit to see what they do. Take them all the way up or you can take this side down towards the dark if you want, and you can see what it's doing. It's making the whole thing darker as you're going down to the dark with all three colors, red, green, and blue. Take those backup. One cool thing that I liked about this is this roughness. You can see when you use this slider, what it does to that. It's pretty smooth. Gay, bring it all the way up to a 100. It can get pretty crazy. You can click on this randomize and it'll just continue to change until you find one that you kind of like say, I like that one right there, say, okay, that's our gradient now in there. One thing you can do with this, and I've done this before is just rotate it a little bit and change the opacity of that layer. It makes kind of a cool background. You can use that background for a lot of different things. That's one thing you can do with the noise gradient. If you want to save it. Noise gradient. Add that to the presets. And there it is. We say, okay, now, let's just throw that away and we'll start another one. There it is. Noise gradient. We can angle it, scale it, go like that. Then we can change the opacity of that layer. It's not quite so wild. There you go. One other thing you can do with this is you can copy this layer. Just drag that up to the New Layer icon. And you can open this one up in the gradient fill and angles the other direction. Now you've got a plaid looking effect. You can do all kinds of things with this. That's our lesson about the gradient editor. You can edit your gradients, you can make new gradients. You can change the colors, you can change the opacity. You can pretty much customize the gradient to the way that you want it to be. In our next lesson, we're going to put a gradient in some type and put a gradient in a shape and make a selection and put a gradient in the selection. Will see you on the next lesson. 5. Using Gradients in Objects: In this lesson, we're going to put some gradients and some objects. We're gonna start with the noise gradient. We'll just hit random until we find one that we like. And I kind of liked that one. Let's use that one. I'm gonna say, okay, I'm not going to save it. Just click Okay on that. I am going to rotate it just a little bit. Okay? I'm gonna say, okay, I want to put a border around this and I want to use some of the colors that are in this gradient. I'm going to click on the foreground color here and open the color picker. And as I move over my artwork, it turns into an eyedropper. And if I click on that, you see it doesn't work. Not changing that color, let's hit Cancel. Click on the background layer because that's an adjustment layer affecting the background layer. If I click on the background layer and then double-click on the foreground color. Now as I come over my artwork, I can click on that blue and it changes to the blue. I want the background color. Double-click on that, and I want that to be maybe this red color right here. Okay? Now we've got a blue and a red foreground and background color. Now what I want to do is change the opacity of this because it's too bright. We need to tone that down just a little bit. So I'm gonna take that down to about, take it down to about 30. Now I want to build a border around there. Let's open up new layer and I wanted to draw them are key for this border. I want to come in. It may be one inch and down one inch. And you can see on the rulers over here and over here where I'm at. Come in an inch and down an inch. I want to do the same over here, which would be at the 11 inch mark and the 11 inch mark. Both rulers Control Delete or Control Backspace to open the fill layer dialog box. And we can fill that with black. That's fine. Now I want to bring that, see the marching ants, this selection. I want to bring that selection in about 50 pixels. Let's go Select, Modify a contract by 50 pixels. Now you can see the marching ants are inside. If I just pushed Delete on that. Now we have our border, but the borders of black hit Command D or Control D on a PC to de-select that, I want to come up here to my Gradient fill or adjustment layer. Now I want to use my foreground to background gradient, which is right there. I'm going to spin it around just a little bit and click Okay, and now I'm going to clip it. This layer. When you clip at the gradient, will only show up where there's pixels on this layer. Clip it. You can hold down the Option or the Alt. And when you get that little square with an arrow going down, you can click on that. And now it's clipped to this layer. We want to put a double border on here. So let's do that again. Click on the marquee. Let's get a new layer down here. Let's come down an inch and a half and an inch and a half and draw it out. So we want to go to 10.5510 on our rulers. Fill that with black. Now this is the selection Select, Modify, Contract, contract that selection by 5050 pixels. Hit Delete. And we can do the same thing with that one. De-select that. Go up to the adjustment layer, the gradient fill, and pick our foreground and background color. Let's spin it around the other way this time. Go that direction. Click Okay, Let's clip it. Clip it to that layer, hold down the Option or Alt, click that to that layer. And now we have a double border going around with the gradient inside the border. That's how you can add a gradient to selections. Now let's try some type, come over and get your type tool. Arial Black regular, That's pretty good. Three 146, that's probably a little too big. Let's go 200. Let's click in here and type something. Let's move that dance. We can see what we're doing. Now there's two ways that you add a gradient to the type. You can make a selection of that type by holding down the Command or Control and clicking on that type layer. When you drag down a gradient fill layer creates the gradient fill and you have a mask right there. Now all you need to do is go into your gradient. Let's pick a gradient. Any old gradient, we'll do a little bit. You see what it's doing. You can move it around in there. You can scale it. You can do all kinds of things with it. Click Okay, and there it is. There's your gradient inside the type. One thing that's wrong with that, you can't really change that type without doing a little bit of work. Let's go in and change this type right here. Let's call it text. You can see how we have text there, but that's still says type and our gradient. It's an easy fix. Make sure your Layer Mask is selected that has the little border around it. Select All, and fill it with black. Now, just make a selection of the text by holding down the Command or Control. If you're on a PC and click on that layer, it makes a selection of that text. Click on your Layer Mask, hit Shift, Delete or Backspace, and choose white. That changes that the layer mask. But let me show you a better way. Instead of making a layer mask, don't select that type. Just make a new gradient fill layer. And we'll click on a different gradient here. And then we'll clip it to the text, like we did all the others. Now we can go back into here. Now we can see what we're doing. And you can rotate it and scale it. Bring it down, you can move it. You can do whatever you want. With that text. Click. Okay. Now, because we're clipped to this layer, we can go in and change that type. And we don't have to do any other flashing around. There you go. That's how you can put a gradient in type. I would suggest you use this gradient fill in with a clipping. Let's make sure we're on the top layer. And then let's pull on this. This graphic. Enlarge it a little bit. And we can do the same thing with that as we did with our type. Just create checkmark there, create the Adjustment Layer, gradient adjustment layer. It looks like we need to create a gradient for that. So let's go ahead and create a gradient. Double-click on that. Let's go from, let's go from a white. Well, let's go from let's go from a pink color or a light red color. Dark red car. Go down a little bit darker on this red, make it a deep dark red apple. We've got some transparency there. We don't want transparency in our apple. Let's make that 100% opaque. Now we're going to go from this lighter red to the darker red. Let's make this a radial. Let's put it just put it down here for a minute because we can't really see what we're doing until we click Okay and click that to the layer, hold down Option or Alt. Clip that to the layer. Now we can see what we've got. Double-click that again to open up the gradient fill. We can scale this. We need to scale this down ways. And we can move that around. We get it where we like it. There you go. We've got a gradient in selections. We've got a gradient in type, I've got a gradient DNS in a shape. We've got the gradient in the background. That's the end of this lesson. I'll see you on the next one. Thanks, Bye. 6. Saving Your Gradient for Future Use: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can save your gradients so you can use them in the future. Let's start with the gradient editor. Let's just use that gradient right there. Let's create our own custom gradient. Pick a green. Okay, and then we can just copy that green. If you hold down the Option or Alt, you can copy that green over here. Okay, there we go. Let's say that's our custom gradient. Will just name it custom, add it to the preset. Match there. Click OK here. Now if you go back here into the default, you can see there's our custom gradient and it's there and you can use it. But watch this. If you try to use one of these other categories, it'll say, Oh, do you want to save that gradient? If you click Save, we'll just name it the custom Save. Now we've gone to these other, some of these other categories. Now if we go back to default, see that it's not there. You click on this little icon here, the arrow with the lines by it and say Load gradient. There's our custom gradient that we saved right there. And if we open that up, then liquid it does to your custom gradient. It duplicates all the default gradients that were in there. There's our foreground to background. Here's your foreground to transparent or black to white. You come down here and there they are again. Did put our new gradient in there, saved all those other default gradients. Now they're in there twice. If you go back to our editor and you can see we have everything in there twice. I'm going to show you how to prevent that. Okay, there. Let's go back to this. We've just say reset gradients. Okay, there we go. Now we're back to normal. Let's open up that gradient. Again, k, we still have our gradient here. Customer will name a custom one. Add to the preset. Now what you need to do is delete all of these out of there. Just right-click if you're on a PC or control-click if you're on a Mac and select each one and delete it out of there. They're not going anywhere, they'll still be on your computer. We're just deleting the amount of this set that includes your custom gradient. There's our custom gradient, custom one. We're going to save that. Now if you go back here, There's our gradient right there and it's in the default. Watch this. If we go to something else, it'll say, Hey, do you want to save it? Sure, save it. And we call it customer one. Customer. Save. Now if we go back to default, it's not there, but already faults are still there. All you have to do is click on the arrow with the lines next to it. Get this drop-down menu. Click on Load gradient. And you want to load custom one gradient. Open. There it is. When you close Photoshop and you open Photoshop backup, you'll probably have to load that custom gradient in with your defaults. Once again, you just do that again. You just do that from here. Little arrow with the lines. Get this drop-down menu, and click on load gradients. Pick your gradient and you can pick more than one. And it'll load it in here. You just need to remember to delete all of those defaults before you save it in the Gradient Editor. That's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. 7. Conclusion and Class Project: Thanks for joining me in this class. I hope you've learned something about gradients in Photoshop Elements and you can use these same techniques in the full version of Photoshop as well. For the class project, I want you to just use some gradients to build something. A flyer or poster greeting card wherever you want. Save it as a JPEG and upload it to the student gallery. If you have any problems or any questions, you can use the discussion section below, I'll be monitoring that. And if you have any questions or problems, I'm sure there's others that will have the same questions or problems. And I'll be able to jump in and help any way that I can. Again, thank you for joining me in this class and I'll see you in the next class. Thanks, Bye.