From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

912 Two ways to colorize with gradients

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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912 Two ways to colorize with gradients

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week marks the fourth of four weeks in which I find myself trapped in my home inside a repeating, but happily finite cycle of carefully executed symmetry, and exactingly applied colorfulness inside the comparatively infinite pixel-based realm that is Photoshop. This cycle began weeks ago with a single straight ahead portrait shot. And now ends weeks later with impossibly symmetrical faces that are reading from top left clockwise, purple, green, and yellow. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final version of that extremely colorful composition open inside Photoshop. We're going to start with the naturally colored layers. And for now we're going to specifically focus our attention on the two groups called delicate. So I'll turn off the Amazon group so that we're looking at these two perfect people. And I'll go ahead and select that top delicate group, because I want to colorize both groups, so everything underneath, using a gradient layer. And so if you're working along with me, drop down to this black and white icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox. If you're working on a Mac, you want to press the Option key and click on that item. If you're working on a PC, then press the Alt key and right-click, and then go ahead and choose Gradient in order to create a new gradient layer. And I'm just going to call this one VY because it's going to go from violet to yellow. And because I know I want to affect the hues inside the image without affecting the saturation values or the brightness levels, I'll go ahead and change the blend mode in advance to hue, and then I'll click OK. Now, in my case, I end up with this black to transparent gradient, which is not remotely what I want. However, I do want the style to be linear, and I'm looking for an angle value of zero degrees so that the gradient is horizontal. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on that gradient ramp in order to bring up the gradient editor dialog box. Notice this guy in the top-right corner of this gradient ramp here indicates an opacity level of 0%. I don't want that, so I'll just go ahead and drag that guy away so that the entire gradient is opaque. Now I'll double click on this first color stop, which is located below what is now a black bar in order to bring up the color picker. And I'll change the hue value to 260. Then I'll take both the saturation and brightness values up to a hundred percent and I will click OK. All right, now I'll double click on the last color stop, to once again bring up the color picker, and I'll change the hue value to 50 degrees, and then I'll set both the saturation and brightness values to a hundred percent. And that way we will achieve a nice shade of yellow. At which point I'll click OK a couple of times in order to accept those changes. And that's all there is to this one. So I'll just go ahead and click OK again. All right, that's one way to colorize an image with an independent gradient layer. Another way is to use the layer effect. And so I'll go ahead and turn on the Amazon group once again. And I'll click on that group to select it. And then I'll click on the FX icon at the bottom of the layers panel. And I will choose gradient overlay. Now, in my case, I'm seeing this entirely white gradient. That's not really what I'm looking for, however. So I'll just go ahead and click on this gradient ramp right there in order to return to the gradient editor dialogue box. I'll double-click on this first color stop right here in order to bring up the color picker dialog box. And I'll change the hue to 120 degrees. And I'll take both the saturation and brightness values up to a hundred percent so that we have the brightest shade of green possible. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, now I'm going to take this last color stop and I'm going to move it to a location value of 50%, and then I'll double click on it and I'll enter a few different values. I'll change the hue value this time to 150 degrees, which is still a shade of green, albeit a bluer one. And now I'll Tab to the saturation value and take it up to a hundred percent. And then I'll go ahead and click OK. And now I'm going to grab this opacity stop right here, take it down to a location of 50%, and change the opacity value to 50% as well. And now I'll click OK to accept those colors. All right, now this guy's looking pretty glowy right now. I'm going to change the angle to zero degrees, just so that we're going back and forth. I'm also going to go with the style of reflected so that the bright green is right there in the center and it fades in both directions. And now I'll change the blend mode to that same blend mode we used before, which is hue, and we'll end up with this effect here. All right, now that I've entered all the settings I want to, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to add that gradient overlay effect. Just one more thing I want to do is to take up the saturation values. And so I'll drive down to this black and white circle once again, on the Mac, Option + Click on it. On the PC, Alt + Right-click on it, and then choose this guy, Vibrance. And that'll force the display of the new layer dialogue box. At which point I'll just call this guy up sat and click OK. And I'll select the saturation value right here, and I'll set it to 30. And then I'll press the Enter key to accept that change. And I'll go ahead and hide the properties panel. And there you have it, two different ways to colorize an image using gradients, either by way of an independent gradient layer or a gradient overlay effect here inside Photoshop. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you two different ways to mask gradient effects. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you how to create lanterns. Yes, repeating lanterns inside Adobe Illustrator. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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