Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Applying Gradients

You may have noticed that a few of the Layer styles and Photo Effects apply a color tint that fades away at the edges of your layer or image. In fact, Elements lets you fade and blend colors in almost any way you can imagine by using gradients. With gradients, you can create anything from a multicolor rainbow extravaganza to a single color that fades away into transparency. Figure 13-17 shows you a few examples of what you can do with gradients. The only limit is your imagination.

Figure 13-17. Here are three examples of gradients drawn with the Gradient tool. Top: This figure shows a gradient that creates a rainbow effect. Middle: If you play with the Gradient Editor (Editing Gradients), you can create all sorts of interesting effects. Here's the gradient from the top figure again, only this time it's applied left to right instead of top to bottom. It looks so different because the noise option was used (see Creating noise gradients). Click the Randomize button a couple of times for this effect. Bottom: This figure shows a gradient you can create if you want a landscape background for artwork.

You can apply gradients directly to your image using the Gradient tool, or you can create Gradient Fill layers, which are whole layers filled with—you guessed it—gradients. You can even edit gradients and create new ones by using the Gradient Editor. Finally, there's a special ...