237 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking ✦ Gradient preview: The selected gradient appears in the gradient preview, labeled in Figure 6-9. Click the preview to open the Gradient Editor dialog box, discussed in the upcoming section “Creating custom gradations.” Figure 6-9: The Options bar gives you quick access to all the gradient tool options. ✦ Gradient drop-down palette: Click the triangle adjacent to the preview to dis- play the Gradient palette, which contains icons representing gradients in the current gradient presets. Click the icon for the gradient you want. In the default gradient preset, the first two gradations are dependent on the current foreground and background colors. The others contain specific colors bearing no relationship to the colors in the toolbox. You load gradient presets using the same techniques that I describe in detail in the brush preset discussion in Chapter 5. Here’s a brief recap: • Click the triangle near the top of the drop-down palette to display the palette menu. The Photoshop collection of presets and any presets that you define appear at the bottom of the palette menu. Click a preset name to use the preset instead of the current preset or append the new preset to the current one. • To append a preset from disk — such as when a coworker gives you a preset file — choose Load Gradients from the palette menu or click Load in the Preset Manager dialog box. If you want to replace the current pre- set instead, choose Replace Gradients from the palette menu or click Replace in the dialog box. To return to the default gradients, choose Reset Gradients from the palette menu, either from the Options bar palette or the one in the Preset Manager dialog box. Note Gradient style icons Click for menu Click to display palette Gradient preview 238 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching You can edit a gradient and perform the aforementioned preset juggling acts from within the Gradient Editor dialog box, too. The upcoming section “Creating custom gradations” covers this dialog box. ✦ Gradient style: Click an icon to select the gradient style — a function that you formerly accomplished by choosing a specific gradient tool. The next section explains these five styles. ✦ Mode and Opacity: These options work as they do for the paint and edit tools, the Fill command, and every other tool or command that offers them as options. Select a different brush mode to change how colors are applied; lower the Opacity value to make a gradation translucent. Remember that you can change the Opacity value by pressing number keys as well as by using the Opacity control on the Options bar. Press 0 for 100 percent opacity, 9 for 90 percent, and so on. ✦ Reverse: When active, this simple check box begins the gradation with the background color and ends it with the foreground color. Use this option when you want to start a radial or other style of gradation with white, but you want to keep the foreground and background colors set to their defaults. ✦ Dither: In the old days, Photoshop drew its gradients one band at a time. Each band was filled with an incrementally different shade of color. The potential result was banding, in which you could clearly distinguish the transition between two or more bands of color. The Dither check box helps to eliminate this problem by mixing up the pixels between bands (much as Photoshop dithers pixels when converting a grayscale image to black and white). You should leave this option turned on unless you want to use banding to create a special effect. ✦ Transparency: You can specify different levels of opacity throughout a grada- tion. For example, the Transparent Stripes effect (available from the Gradient palette when the Default Gradients preset is loaded) lays down a series of alternately black and transparent stripes. But you needn’t use this trans- parency information. If you prefer to apply a series of black and white stripes instead, you can make all portions of the gradation equally opaque by turning off the Transparency check box. For example, in Figure 6-10, I applied Transparent Stripes as a radial gradation in two separate swipes, at top and bottom. Both times, I changed the Opacity setting to 50 percent, so the dog and the hydrant would never be obscured. (The Opacity setting works independently of the gradation’s built-in trans- parency, providing you with additional flexibility.) In the top gradation, the Transparency check box is on, so the white stripes are completely transpar- ent. In the bottom gradation, Transparency is turned off, so the white stripes become 50 percent opaque (as prescribed by the Opacity setting). Tip 239 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking Figure 6-10: With the Opacity value set to 50 percent, I applied the Transparent Stripes gradation with Transparency on (top) and off (bottom). When Transparency is off, the white stripes obscure the view of the underlying image. Gradient styles In Photoshop 5, you selected different gradient tools to create specific styles of gra- dations. Now the toolbox contains just one gradient tool, and you select the gradi- ent style by clicking the gradient style icons on the Options bar (refer back to Figure 6-9). Note that you can’t use the old Shift+G shortcut for switching styles. Nor can you switch styles by Alt-clicking on the gradient tool icon in the toolbox. 6 Photoshop 6 Transparency on Transparency off 240 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Illustrated in Figure 6-11, the five styles are as follows: ✦ Linear: A linear gradation progresses in bands of color in a straight line between the beginning and end of your drag. The top two examples in Figure 6-11 show linear gradations created from black to white, and from white to black. The point labeled B marks the beginning of the drag; E marks the end. ✦ Radial: A radial gradation progresses outward from a central point in concen- tric circles, as in the second row of examples in Figure 6-11. The point at which you begin dragging defines the center of the gradation, and the point at which you release defines the outermost circle. This means the first color in the gra- dation appears in the center of the fill. So to create the gradation on the right side of Figure 6-11, you must set the foreground color to white and the back- ground color to black (or select the Reverse check box on the Options bar). ✦ Angle: The angle gradient tool creates a fountain of colors flowing in a coun- terclockwise direction with respect to your drag, as demonstrated by the middle two examples of Figure 6-11. This type of gradient is known more com- monly as a conical gradation, because it looks like the bird’s eye view of the top of a cone. Of course, a real cone doesn’t have the sharp edge between black and white that you see in Photoshop’s angle gradient. To eliminate this edge, create a custom gradation from black to white to black again, as I explain in the “Adjusting colors in a solid gradation” section later in this chapter. (Take a peek at Figure 6-16 later in this chapter if you’re not sure what I’m talking about.) ✦ Reflected: Drag with the fourth gradient tool to create a linear gradation that reflects back on itself. Photoshop positions the foreground color at the begin- ning of your drag and the background color at the end, as when using the lin- ear gradient tool. But it also repeats the gradient in the opposite direction of your drag, as demonstrated in Figure 6-10. It’s great for creating natural shad- ows or highlights that fade in two directions. ✦ Diamond: The last gradient tool creates a series of concentric diamonds (if you drag at a 90-degree angle) or squares (if you drag at a 45-degree angle, as in Figure 6-11). Otherwise, it works exactly like the radial gradient tool. 241 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking Figure 6-11: Examples of each of the five gradient styles created using the default foreground and background colors (left column) and with the foreground and background colors reversed (right column). B marks the beginning of the drag; E marks the end. Black to white White to black Linear Radial Angle Reflected Diamond 242 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Creating custom gradations If you’re accustomed to editing gradients in earlier versions of Photoshop, you probably searched high and low for the key to opening the Gradient Editor dialog box, shown in Figure 6-12. Where’s the Edit button that you clicked to open the dia- log box in Version 5? In the Gradient palette menu? On the Options bar? Nope, and nope. The secret passageway to the dialog box— as you already know if you read the “Gradient options” section earlier in this chapter — is the color preview that appears at the left end of the Options bar. If you click the preview, you display the Gradient Editor dialog box; if you click the neighboring triangle, you display the Gradient palette, as shown earlier, in Figure 6-9. Figure 6-12: Click the gradient preview on the Options bar to display the Gradient Editor dialog box, which enables you to design custom gradations. 6 Photoshop 6 243 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking The Gradient Editor offers a new look as well as some new functions in Version 6. Upcoming sections cover these functions in detail, but I want to highlight the fol- lowing changes: ✦ The scrolling list at the top of the dialog box mirrors the Option bar’s Gradient palette and the Gradients panel of the Preset Manager dialog box; if you click the triangle at the top of the scrolling list, you display a virtual duplicate of the palette menu. If you want to see gradient names instead of icons in the list, choose Text Only from the dialog box menu. Or choose Small List or Large List to see both icon and gradient name. ✦ To create a new gradient, find an existing gradient that’s close to what you have in mind. Then type a name for the gradient in the Name option box and click the New button. The new gradient appears in the scrolling list, and you can edit the gradient as you see fit. Even though the gradient appears in the dialog box (as well as in the Gradient palette and Preset Manager dialog box), it’s vulnerable until you save it as part of a preset. If you make further edits to the gradient or replace the cur- rent gradient preset, the original gradient is a goner. Deleting your main Photoshop preferences file also wipes out an unsaved gradient. See the upcoming section “Saving and managing gradients” for more details. ✦ You now can create noise gradients as well as solid-color gradations. If you select Noise from the Gradient Type pop-up menu, Photoshop introduces random color information into the gradient, the result of which is a sort of special-effect gradient that would be difficult to create manually. ✦ The options at the bottom of the dialog box change depending on whether you select Solid or Noise from the Gradient Type pop-up. For solid gradients, Photoshop now provides a Smoothness slider, which you can use to adjust how abrupt you want to make the color transitions in the gradient. ✦ You can resize the dialog box by dragging the size box in the lower-right corner. Editing solid gradients If you select Solid from the Gradient Type pop-up menu, you use the options shown in Figure 6-13 to adjust the gradient. (Note that this is a doctored screen shot— I made all the options visible in the figure, but normally, only some of these options are available at a time.) 6 Photoshop 6 Caution Tip 244 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching The fade bar (labeled in Figure 6-13) shows the active gradient. The starting color appears as a house-shaped color stop on the left; the ending color appears on the far right. The upside-down houses on the top of the fade bar are opacity stops. These stops determine where colors are opaque and where they fade into translu- cency or even transparency. Figure 6-13: Use these controls to adjust the colors and transparency in a solid gradient. To select either type of stop, click it. The triangle portion of the stop appears black to show you which stop is active. After you select a stop, diamond-shaped midpoint markers appear between the stop and its immediate neighbors. On the color-stop side of the fade bar, the midpoint marker represents the spot where the two colors mix in exactly equal amounts. On the transparency side, a marker indicates the point where the opacity value is midway between the values that you set for the stops on either side of the marker. You can change the location of any stop or marker by dragging it. Or you can click a stop or marker to select it and then enter a value in the Location option box below the fade bar: ✦ When numerically positioning a stop, a value of 0 percent indicates the left end of the fade bar; 100 percent indicates the right end. Even if you add more stops to the gradation, the values represent absolute positions along the fade bar. ✦ When repositioning a midpoint marker, the initial setting of 50 percent is smack dab between two stops; 0 percent is all the way over to the left stop, and 100 percent is all the way over to the right. Midpoint values are, therefore, measured relative to stop positions. In fact, when you move a stop, Photo- shop moves the midpoint marker along with it to maintain the same relative positioning. Fade bar Active opacity stop Midpoint marker Active color stop 245 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking Figure 6-14 shows four black-to-white radial gradations that I created by setting the midpoint between the black and white color stops to four different posi- tions. The midpoint settings range from the minimum to maximum allowable Location values. If you enter a value below 13 percent or over 87, Photoshop politely ignores you. In all cases, I set the opacity to 100 percent along the entire gradient. Figure 6-14: Four sets of white-to-black gradations — radial on top and linear at bottom — subject to different midpoint settings. Pressing Enter after you enter a value into the Location option box is tempting, but don’t do it. If you do, Photoshop dumps you out of the Gradient Editor dialog box. Adjusting colors in a solid gradation When editing a solid gradation, you can add colors, delete colors, change the posi- tioning of the colors within the gradient, and control how two colors blend together. After clicking a color stop to select it, you can change its color in several ways: To change the color to the current foreground color, open the Color pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 6-15, and select Foreground. Select Background to use the back- ground color instead. ✦ When you select Foreground or Background, the color stop becomes filled with a grayscale pattern instead of a solid color. If you squint real hard and put your nose to the screen, you can see that the pattern is actually a repre- sentation of the Foreground and Background color controls in the toolbox. 6 Photoshop 6 Tip 13% (minimum) 35% 60% 87% (maximum) 246 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching The little black square appears in the upper-left corner when the foreground color is active, as shown in the first stop on the fade bar in Figure 6-15; the black square moves to the bottom-right corner when the background color is active, as shown in the end stop in the figure. ✦ If you change the foreground or background color after closing the Gradient Editor, the gradient changes to reflect the new color. When you next open the Gradient Editor, you can revert the stop to the original foreground or back- ground color by selecting User Color from the pop-up menu. Figure 6-15: A look at the new color stop options in Version 6 ✦ To set the color stop to some other color, click the Color swatch or double- click the color stop to open the Color Picker and define the new color. Select your color and press Enter. ✦ You may have noticed that when you opened the Gradient Editor dialog box, Photoshop automatically selected the eyedropper tool for you and displayed that tool’s controls on the Options bar. Here’s why: You can click with the eye- dropper in an open image window to lift a color from the image and assign the color to the selected color stop. You can also click the Color palette’s color bar or a swatch in the Swatches palette. Or, if you see the color you want in the fade bar in the dialog box, click it there. Tip Foreground color stop Color midpoint marker Background color stop [...]... gradient tool, as demonstrated in Figure 6- 16 Foreground to Background Fore to Back to Fore Figure 6- 16: Two gradations created with the angle gradient tool, one using the standard Foreground to Background gradient (left) and the other with my reflected Fore to Back to Fore style (right) Which looks better to you? 247 Photoshop 248 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching 6 ✦ To remove a color stop, drag the... unit abbreviation (px for pixels, in for inches, or cm for centimeters) Figure 6- 25: Use the options in the Stroke dialog box to specify the thickness of a stroke and its location with respect to the selection outline In its former life, the Stroke command always applied the foreground color, which meant that you had to remember to set the color before choosing the command In Version 6, you can set the... use for this to create a reflecting gradation For example, select Foreground to Background from the scrolling list of gradients and click New to duplicate the gradient After naming your new gradient — something like Fore to Back to Fore — click the background color stop and change the Location value to 50 Then Alt-drag the foreground color stop all the way to the right This new gradient is perfect for. .. outline Photoshop Stroking is useful for creating frames and outlines Generally speaking, you can stroke an image in Photoshop in four ways: 6 ✦ The Stroke command: Select the portion of the image you want to stroke and choose Edit ➪ Stroke to display the Stroke dialog box shown in Figure 6- 25 Or, if you’re working on a multilayered image, you can choose the Stroke command without making a selection; Photoshop. .. 6- 26: With the Stroke options in the Layer Style dialog box, you can stroke a layer with a solid color, gradient, or pattern You also can adjust the angle and scale of gradients, as I did to create the effect shown in the preview For example, to create a 1-pixel border all the way around, add 2 pixels to the Width value (1 for the left side and 1 for the right) and 2 pixels to the Height value (1 for. .. as desired Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking Figure 6- 29: Here I created a new layer, drew a free-form shape with the lasso tool, and stroked it with a 4-pixel black outline at 30 percent Opacity 7 Set the foreground color as needed I applied a black stroke at 30 percent Opacity, so I set the foreground color to 30 percent gray (Click the stroke with the eyedropper to change the foreground color to... any dyed-in-the-wool Photoshop user will tell you, the rubber stamp is nothing short of invaluable for touching up images You can remove dust fragments, hairs, and other impurities; rebuild creased or torn photographs, and even eliminate elements that wandered into your picture when you weren’t looking So get set for what is undoubtedly the best retouching tool of them all 265 266 Part II ✦ Painting... the fuzzy gradation shown in Figure 6- 23 Figure 6- 23: The Dissolve brush mode option randomizes the pixels around the feathered edges of the selection outlines Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking 14 Choose Select ➪ Deselect (Ctrl+D) to deselect the image 15 Choose Image ➪ Adjust ➪ Invert (Ctrl+I) to invert the entire image 16 Press D to restore black and white as foreground and background colors, respectively... Figure 6- 31, for example, I erased a series of scratches across the stroke to create a dashed-line effect, all the rage for representing cartoon fly trails I then set the eraser brush size to the largest, fuzziest setting and erased the end of the stroke (above the dog’s head) to create a gradual trailing off That crazy fly is now officially distracting our hero from his appointed rounds 261 262 Part... pop-up menu above the sliders Figure 6- 19: Use the new Noise gradient option to create gradients like the ones you see in Figure 6- 18 ✦ The Restrict Colors option, when selected, adjusts the gradient so that you don’t wind up with any oversaturated colors Deselect the option for more vibrant hues ✦ If you select Add Transparency, Photoshop adds random transparency information to the gradient, as if you . marker shows Active opacity stop Opacity midpoints 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 249 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking you where the gradient reaches 60 percent opacity. You can relocate the midpoint marker,. Figure 6- 16. Figure 6- 16: Two gradations created with the angle gradient tool, one using the standard Foreground to Background gradient (left) and the other with my reflected Fore to Back to Fore. Figure 6- 9. Figure 6- 12: Click the gradient preview on the Options bar to display the Gradient Editor dialog box, which enables you to design custom gradations. 6 Photoshop 6 243 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling