Blending Colors in Photoshop

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. Photoshop revolves around editing pixels, unlike Adobe Illustrator, which uses vectors. When an image is rendered into Photoshop, it is compiled by millions of single-colored pixels. At its core, Photoshop works by manipulating each individual pixel according to the tool being used. In this free video series, a graphic designer demonstrates how to use tricks on Adobe Photoshop to work with colors, add effects to images and manipulate graphics. Find out how to use Photoshop to change hair color, to make wallpaper and to make eyes pop. Learn about making icons, Photoshop logos and collages as well. Explore all of the possibilities of Adobe Photoshop with these helpful tips.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Zack Katagiri, freelance graphic designer in New York City and today we're talking about PhotoShop. In this video, we're going to use PhotoShop's gradient feature to create a blend from one color to another on a layer background. So, first, I'm going to go up to Layer and select New Fill Layer. Then, I'm going to go to Gradient, and click OK and the Gradient Fill dialog box comes up. And, so you can see this goes from black to transparent, and you can also see a preview of that over here, it's going from black to transparent. If I wanted to change the angle, so if I wanted it, say, to go from right to left, then I could grab this and move the angle of the gradient. I can also move it the other way, and there's different ways you can have the fade. You can have it as a dot in the middle, spreading out, you have lots of different options. Right now I'm going to stick with the linear fade. It's the most straightforward, but you can play around with those if you want. If you want to fade from one color to another, rather than black or transparent, then you just click there and the gradient editor comes up and you can see that there's a whole bunch of preset gradients here. You can click one and it will change what your layer looks like. And they all have different, you know, this one goes from brown to white to brown and back to white again, and these two boxes tell how opaque each of the colors are going to come across. So, our default, which goes from black to transparent, starts here with an opacity of 100 and ends here with an opacity of 0, going from black to black. If I wanted to make this go from one color to another, then I would want both opacities set to 100 and then rather than going from black to black, I will have this go from red to blue. Click OK. You can see, this is what your fade is going to look like. You can also change how much red you have by moving this little diamond, and you can make it mostly red if you want. I'm going to leave it here in the middle, and them I'm going to click OK and OK and now you can fade two colors in any layer that you want in PhotoShop. You can also do this for objects. Let's see, if I choose, say, a rectangle. I'll make my rectangle there, and then I can go to layer and layer style, and then go to Gradient Overlay, and then I can overlay a gradient within the rectangle that we added. Again, it's just, you know, you have the same set of options. If you click there, I can make it go from, you know, different colors, let's say like orange, to... there we go. Alright, and now you have a gradient with an object, and you can also use use this gradient tool to create gradients. Let's just do one from black to white, and if I wanted to do that, then I can create a new layer and make a gradient that goes across the layer by clicking and dragging."