Photoshop Gradients Video Tutorial

hello this is Gary Simon here with design course calm and the design letter today we're going to take a look at the gradient and we're going to take a look at the gradient tool and the gradient overlay option as a layer style a gradient is basically going from one color to another in a smooth transition alright so let's go to file new it's going to choose 800 x 500 with a resolution of 72 hit OK zoom up here in case you're not at a hundred percent with the magnifying glass tool alright so I'm going to take the paint bucket tool and change the background to a black okay let click alright so today I'm going to illustrate the different ways to create gradients and use them through a button so let's get out our type tool and I'm just going to have aro around aerial rounded here and I'm going to choose white as the foreground color okay you can use whatever font you want doesn't really matter so click type in order now we're going to create you an order button okay so underneath it let's just select the background layer let's use the rounded rectangular tool so I gradient I'm gonna leave at ten pixels or the radius and then I'm going to choose a foreground color of a light blue hit OK and then I'm just going to select right around it just a big order button basically all right okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to group these layers so with the shape one layer selected hold ctrl and click on order now and then over here new group from layers you just call it button hit OK alright so now we have I'm just one single layer to go ahead and just move this around alright so i'm going to right click duplicate group actually let me move over here right click duplicate group hit ok hold shift and move over right click duplicate group again it ok hold shift and move it over again alright so here are three buttons and which will work with high gradients so right off the bat um we don't have to necessarily add a gradient to all of our buttons that's just one thing I want to emphasize don't over use gradients but I'm going to show you how to use them though alright so but so I expand the very first button group that we have and the first way to add a gradient is through the gradient overlay option we're not going to use this tool over here alright so with the shape one layer selected which is layer that we want to add the gradient will right click or double click I mean with the left mouse button on the right side of the layer and that brings this up these are the layer style options we can apply all these different types of layer styles to this specific layer what we want to focus on today is the gradient overlay so if we click that it applies a default gradient just from black to white or white to blackish today we can set the scale we put a 150 it starts way up here our way down here and the way up here it really scales it out whereas we go to just ten percent you get the idea ok so I'm just going to set it at 150 and then if we click right here gradient we get the gradient editor I we have all these different presets just click one and it automatically applies all these different crazy-looking presets here what I want to focus on is a very first one which is the foreground to background which stitch takes your current foreground to your background and that's a gradient right there so these are our color Pickers we can move them and obviously you can see affects the orientation of the gradient I and we could double-click them as well so this white one over here double-click it and I were able to change the color I just go back right around here I'm going to make this a real like a teal color so going from teal to this blue kind of just makes the button pop hit okay another thing we can do is we can just click here we can add a ton of gradients or color Pickers and you can see really affects the actual gradient itself but that doesn't look good and usually it doesn't more often than not we can't create kind of like a metallic effect so if we just move these real close to each other in the center somewhere it almost on top of each other add another one over here and add another one over here and double-click it to change the color ok okay then hit ok and then head ok we can see that it kind of creates as a like a brief type of metallic effect on the button that's one way to add a gradient the second way I is to create a layer mask so if we create a new layer and select this button right here use previously to create a clipping mask hit OK and then get a gradient tool out and up here it allows us to see the same presets let's go to foreground to transparent and up here this allows us to really choose different types of gradient styles this is the very default one which is just a linear gradient I and we select say maybe a darker color right here for our foreground hold shift and you can see that we have a brief gradient I we can also add multiple we can do this multiple times and it all stays on the same layer that's one way another way the third way over here this way only works on shapes which is what this is is created by a tool over here or the pen tool I we can click right here and that gives us our path outline hold ctrl and then left-click once and that outlines the entire outline or whatever the path is then we can create a new layer ctrl shift n it doesn't have to be a clipping mask this time hit OK and then anything that we have will only basically we have the same effect as this left button except it just applied differently because if I drop this down you'll see the layer mask it's actually taking this entire area but it's only showing through the visible I path beneath it ok so those are the three ways to add I gradients and in this case right here and I would only use I the very first option for the button however you don't always want to use a gradient overlay through the layer Styles option for example if I'm working with a background and I want to add a gradient to the background usually just create a new layer take the gradient tool I and usually I'll use this to preset right here which is foreground to transparent let me change the background color just like a slight slightly lighter version and hold shift straight down and there we go pretty simple we can add multiple gradients if you want you can even create a new another one say for example we wanted to add like a drop shadow like a spherical drop shadow underneath one of these change our foreground color to something like around here okay and then just drag out or this could be just a glow actually so if we take our square marquee tool and just select a little bit above and below the button hit delete we have kind of like a Google go glow thing not a big deal really i but these are the ways you can work with gradients one of the most important things to get out of this is first you have to understand how to use gradients which I just gave you a pretty good run down and then second I how to use them effectively and not overdo them all right that's it on scary Simon here and check out design course calm if you haven't already I you'll see a ton of tutorials I as a member which are a ton better than this one which show full website design and logo design all right talk to you later what you