How to make CUSTOM GRADIENT in Photoshop. And Gradient tool TIPS to blow your mind

How to Make Custom Gradient in PhotoshopHey, it's Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and welcome to this week's tutorial. What I'm going to do is show you how to use the Gradient Tool inside of Photoshop. Hey Cafe crew, I've heard from a lot of you and a lot of people don't really understand how the Gradient Tool works. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a crash course on the Gradient Tool right now inside of Photoshop. So I'm going to show you all the different options on how to do custom gradients. Now, this is useful for graphic designers, for artists, illustrators and for photographers. It's a great tool to master. So let's jump right in. So if we go to the left-hand column here, we can see there's our Gradient Tool. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the background and we're just going to apply gradient. So once we click the Gradient Tool, which is also the G key, we go up to the top here and this is our gradient picker. So these are all the presets. These are the ones you see right now. If you click on here, we can actually load in other presets and you'll see all these other sets right there so maybe we can bring in some metals. We'll just click a pen and you'll see there's more presets there than what you saw originally. So the first one here, this is our foreground to background. This is our most basic gradient and what we can do is just click down here to set ourforeground to background color. And we'll do this; we'll set a little background here. So why don't we just grab a light gray, and for the background color, and by the way,if you hit the Option key and you click on it, you can set your background color. We're going to grab our slide, maybe just a bluish tinge there, maybe a little darkthere. How about there?Click OK. So now we've set our foreground to background colors. Now, to apply this gradient, all you need to do is you'll see these different typeshere and we'll just start with the first one which is a Linear Gradient. Now make sure your mode is set to Normal, Opacity to 100, and these are just Ditherand Transparency turned on.

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Those are the default settings. Now what happens is when I click and drag, you'll see this line and we apply the gradientlike that. So what it does is it blends the two colors together through that little line. So if I do a little short little tool like that, short distance, you'll notice those lines blend as two colorsóforeground and background. They blend over the short distance. If I pull it down further, they blend more gradually. Now, if you hold down the Shift key, you can constrain this to a perfect vertical or horizontal. So we can see there, we can just redo that. All right, so that's the basic foreground to background gradient. Okay, what if we want to go in and look at something a little more complex like, maybemake a custom gradient. Well, to create a custom gradient, what we do is we click on the Gradient Tool and theGradient Editor that will pop up. Now here in the Gradient Editor, we can choose preset or we can go in and we can customize. I want to show you how to customize it just so you know how it works. So here are the stops and we know we were doing foreground to background. Now, if you wanted to change that, you just simply change the foreground and backgroundcolor, right?But what will happen is once we click on here, as soon as we click on one of those colors,notice the changes to custom. So we can go click on the color here and we can choose a different color. All right, so we could have done that for foreground to background, right?We can also change the blending by moving that little stop across. See that?And that will cause it to blend and not linear in the middle, but it will cause it to waitit more to one side than the other. Now here's the cool thing. We can click anywhere to add another color stop. So we can go here and maybe add a bluish color, and you can see now we got a gradient withthree different colors. Now, sometimes you might want to do something like maybe put a little sheen in here, soI'm going to click again and we're going to apply a white gradient, or very close to white. Now we get a little sheen. Now what if I want to put the blue on the other side?I could click and apply that and choose that color again or I could hit the Alt key whichis the Option and click and drag out a copy of that. Notice that, now, we've got five different colors in this gradient. And in-between each one, we can move this, so notice if we want to have just this sheena very short distance, we can do that. And as I click on each one of these stoppers, notice it brings up those little stops orthose little tabs. So we can control how it goes in between in each one. So this is looking pretty good. And we can change the gradient types here, Solid or Noise, and Noise will just give youthis kind of stuff. It's interesting. But let's just go back to our solid gradient. Now if I want to save it, I just hit Save and we can call this one "Sheen," and thiswill save that whole gradient set, which is, you know, all of these gradients. These are all metallic ones. Now if I want to save just this individual one, all I could do is just click on New and notice that it will just add it there and that will be available later. So I'm going to click okay and now I'm going to apply this gradient. And we can see that we've got this different type of effect now. All right, so that's how you customize a gradient. Now let's look at these different shapes. Why do I have these on here, because I'm going to show you different types of gradients?I'm going to show you how to create a cylinder. I'm going to show you how to create a sphere. And I'm going to show you how create a cone. Right now, we just have a rectangle, a circle and a square. So let's start on the rectangle and we're going to turn this rectangle into a cylinder. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to Command or Ctrl on Windows, click on that thumbnail to load the selection. Notice that I'm working on that cylinder layer. Now what we want to do is we're just going to go back to our default here and we've got different options. So we've got this reflective gradient tool. So if I click this reflective, what this will do is when I apply this gradient here, noticewhat it does. It repeats it. Now let's go for a different color. Let's go for something a little darker there and, once again, if we do this, it will reflect it. See that?And we can create that kind of effect. And you can see just if we do it very short distance, it's very abrupt. A longer distance will create more of a cylinder like that and notice how we can have it reflecting wherever we want, so that's one way of doing it. The other way, of course, we could go under Preset and choose a preset such as that oneand just click and drag it across holding down the Shift key to constrain it and wecan also turn that into more of a cylinder so it makes it look dimensional. Okay, let's move on to the circle. Let's select that layer, Ctrl Click or Command Click to select it. Now we want a sphere. The way we can do that is we can go to the second option here, which a spherical optionor a circular gradient and just click and drag, and notice we can do that. It doesn't look good like this, so we want more of a foreground to background kind ofan effect here. So let's grab that and we can create that. See that?Now it looks like a sphere, like it's got some dimension to it. If it doesn't look right, just choose Reverse, because if I do this, it will reverse it out. So if looks weird like that, just go the other way and we'll give you the reverse of that. So there's another way of working. All right, so now, finally, I'm going to go in here and I'm going to show you how to createa cone. I said a cone but this is not a cone, it's a square. Well, I'll show you this is the best way to create a cone inside of Photoshop. So we're going to select that, Ctrl Click to select that square, and then, let's gowith the same kind of metallic thing. We're going to grab our Gradient Tool now and let's go down for a more silvery one. Let's see how this silvery one looks. Let's see if it looks any good. I'm going to Shift to drag it across. We certainly don't want to be in the circular. Make sure we are linear there. We can drag that across and, yeah, it's not bad. It kind of creates this kind of cool effect. Yeah, it's not bad. But I'm going to go down and we're just going to use the same one that we used before becauseI think this just looks better. There we go, it's just simpler. Okay, but this is not a cone; it's a square. Well, this is what we do. We hit Ctrl T for Free Transform, then we're going to right click and we're going to use Perspective, and I'm just going to grab the top here, and I'm just going to pull it all the way in until those two edges are touching. Hit Enter to apply, Ctrl D to deselect, and now we got a cone. So you can see, we've been able to create these objects pretty quickly. Now if we apply a shadow and I have another tutorial that shows you how to create a shadowon there, you can get a real cool effect. Now, let me show you, just to end this, I'm going to grab the Gradient Tool here. We're going to grab the rainbow-colored gradient and I'm going to grab the circular option,now our radial gradient is what they call it. So under the Mode, though, I want to try a different blend mode. Let's try a Screen Blend Mode. So if we click and drag this out, notice we can start to blend these together and createsome really cool and interesting effects. Now we can get different effects by doing different types of blend modes. This is an Overlay Blend Mode now. Multiply and now we get a completely different more of a dark effect. Okay, so let's go down and try something like a Difference Blend Mode. Now, as you see here, we can get some really interesting effects. Look at this. Look how cool this is. We're creating this really amazing shape, just this nice pattern, just by using thedifferent blend modes. So I can hide those two layers on the top. You can see what we're able to do. So, anyway, I hope you enjoyed this kind of touching on gradients a little bit that giveyou a better understanding. Don't forget to hit that Subscribe button, become part of the Cafe crew and you'll geta new Photoshop tutorial every single week. So thanks, guys. Hit that Like button. Tell your friends and add a comment, and until next time, I'll see you at the Cafe.