Creating gradient transitions in Adobe Photoshop

- In this movie, we'll take a look at how to create custom gradients in Adobe Photoshop and in the next movie, we'll learn to apply the gradients as a Gradient Wipe in Adobe Premiere Pro. Alright, so before we head into Photoshop to create our custom gradients, let me just show you what exactly I mean. I've got several transitions here, and they're going to all look pretty different, and they have have different shapes and textures. This one comes from a picture of a fire. This one comes from a picture of a snowstorm. And this one comes from a picture of some leaves.

So one thing they have in common is that they're all created from a gradient, or a grayscale image that gradually goes from dark to light. And it's through this spectrum, that Premiere Pro transitions from one video image to another. You can customize any type of gradient transition that you like in this way. So let's figure out how. I'm going to hide Premiere Pro and I want to take a look at these three images. So this is a color picture of flames, but you can definitely see that we have a pretty good spectrum going from light to dark, and we're going to take advantage of that.

And here are our leaves. And our snowstorm. Okay. So let's go ahead and bring these into Photoshop. Alright, and before I actually tackle one of these images, I just want to show you the very simplest way to create a gradient and that is with the Gradient Tool. So, I'm just going to go to File, New... and I want this to be the same resolution as my video. And it's actually at 1280 by 720. So I'll put that in.

And I'm just going to call this gradient1. And okay. And I'm going to come over to my Gradient Tool, and by default, I have this first one chosen. So I'm going from a dark to light. You can fashion your own gradient, but I'm going to stay simple for now. And there are a number of gradient types that you can take advantage of. Of course, the linear gradient just ramps from black to white. If you go all the way across the image it does it gradually. If you just do a portion of the image, it's going to do a lot more stark. And you know, this does matter, because where the black, white, and gray values are determines how it transitions from one image to the other.

Now we of course have our radial gradient, and we have a clock gradient. Okay. And we have a reflected gradient. And we have our diamond gradient. So, let's go ahead and just save one of these. I'm going to do the clock, and we'll save this out. Okay. And I'm going to make it a JPEG, at Maximum Quality. Okay. So that's our first one. We have all of these values going from black to white, and Premiere Pro is going to use that to form the white.

Now let's go over to the images that we brought in, and this is not 1280 by 720, so I'd recommend maybe using the Crop Tool to get it exactly right. So I'm going to come up to here, and type in 1280 and 720. So now, wherever I crop this, I'm going to have the correct resolution. So, how about right there, and I'll press enter. And I'm going to make this black and white, and I'm going to do that with the Black & White Adjustment Layer, and I could leave it like this.

I have some lighter values, I have some darker values, and I have some gray values, so it will work. But I usually like to make my black and white values pop, just a little bit more. So I'm going to take my slider tool here, and I'm going to drag my image so that I get a little bit more contrast. I don't want to go too contrasty, because then all my grays disappear. But I'm just sort of dragging until I like, where my blacks, whites, and grays are, and I'll come here and do the same. And I can keep going here, I can also add a Levels Adjustment Layer and manually tweak my lights, dark, and gray values here as well.

Okay, so I think I'm happy with that. Let's go ahead and save that out, and I'm just going to save that as a JPEG, and I'll do my flames next. And I'll go ahead and crop that to 1280 by 720. Okay. And I'll do the same thing. I'll add the Black & White Adjustment Layer, and then I'll grab my slider tool, and make sure that I have some good, crisp, light values, dark values, and gray values as well. Okay. And I'm okay with that, so I'll save that out, as a JPEG too.

Alright, and then finally I'll go to my snowstorm. I only want a portion of this image, really just this part of the snow in the sky. So again, I'll crop it. We've got our 1280 by 720. So let me just get this exactly where I want it. Alright, maybe a little bit of the trees on each of the corners. That might make an interesting texture, and enter. Okay. Right now I have a good black and a good white, but it's a little too stark so I'm going to try to introduce a few more grays so that the transition happens more gradually.

So let's go ahead and grab our Levels adjustment, and I'm going to grab my midtones and lighten those up a little bit. Okay, not too much, but I'm going to ride these sliders until I like it. Okay. And let's also apply a filter on this. So I'm going to select my layer, and go to Stylize, and Wind... Okay. Then there's the Stagger, a Blast, and just regular Wind. Think I'm going to try the Blast. Okay.

And we'll go with that. We've got some good blacks, whites, and grays. So let's save that out as well. Okay, so now we have some interesting looks here. Here's our clock gradient. We have our leaves, and our snowstorm, and our flames, and we'll use these in the next movie, with our Gradient Wipe effect.