How to Create Backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a great program that can be used for many things like school projects, personal projects, or just plain fun. One great tool that can be found in Adobe Photoshop is the gradient tool. This can be used to fill in things and a great use of it is for backgrounds.

Instructions

1. Open Adobe Photoshop.

2. Click on File>”New…”. Choose any size for the file, but 4x6 is a good sized file to start off with for an example.

3. Locate the toolbar to the left and look at all of the icons. The gradient tool is not shown there, it is hidden in the toolbar.

4. Right click the paint bucket and a menu will pop up that shows the paint bucket tool and the Gradient Tool. Click on this icon to activate the tool.

5. The top of the program will show the gradient brush options. You will see five different gradient options that shows how the gradient will look.

6. Select the most basic gradient, the choice on the far left. This will do a simple fade from side to side.

7. The gradient uses two colors and fades them between each other. Choose each color in the toolbar to left.

8. On the toolbar, the color that overlays the other color will be the first color featured in the gradient.

9. Once the colors are selected, you are now ready to create your background. Bring the cursor into the project window and go up into the top left corner.

10. Click down in the top left corner and drag your mouse cursor down to the bottom right corner. Let go of the mouse and the gradient will appear.

11. Try doing the tool around different parts of the project to see how the gradient changes from each position.

12. After trying out a few different directions, select a new gradient in the top toolbar. Play around with the different styles and figure out which kind of background will work for you.

13. Go to File>”Save…” to save your project.