From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using gradients to add color effects - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Using gradients to add color effects

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at two ways to use gradients to add color to a black and white image. Now, I want to point out this isn't truly a black and white image. It's not in the grayscale color mode. It is in the RGB color mode. If you have a grayscale image, you'll need to go to the Image menu and then to Mode and change it from Grayscale to RGB in order to add in some color. All right, from the Layer menu, I'm going to add a new fill layer and choose Gradient. I'll change the blend mode to Color so that we can see the color from the gradient, but the luminosity from the flower below. If we want to create our own gradient, we can click in the gradient itself, and that brings up the Gradient Editor. But for now, I'm going to select from the presets. Using the downward pointing triangle there, I'm going to look at the different purple presets. We can apply any one of these. In fact, we can even apply multiple presets if we add multiple gradient fill layers. But I think I'm happy with this one. I'll tap Enter to dismiss the preset popup and then change the style from Linear to Radial. I want the purple on the outside and the pink on the inside, so I'll choose Reverse and then apply that. But I don't like the blue that's being overlaid in the black area of the photograph. So I'll select my Object Selection tool and then click in the flower in order to select it. Then I'll tap the V key to select the Move tool and hide that overlay. And in the Layers panel, I'll make sure that the gradient fill mask is targeted. But I don't want to hide the gradient fill from the flower. I want to hide it from the background. So I'll choose Select Inverse and then Edit and Fill in order to fill that area with black, which will hide the gradient fill color. All right, let's deselect that, and then I'm going to tap B to select my paintbrush. I think that the gradient just looks a little bit too perfect. So I'm going to tap 3 to give me 30%. And I'll be sure that I'm painting with black. And I'm just going to paint in a few areas here in the image so that the colors are a little bit more varied. And to me that just looks a little bit more realistic. Of course, we could always go in and select different areas and add additional gradient fill layers or even solid color fill layers. But for now, I want to show you another way to add color toning, and that's by remapping all of the grayscale values to a gradient. So let's hide this layer, and at the bottom of the Layers panel, I'm going to select the Gradient Map option. Here we can see that it's remapping all of the values in the image from black to white. Well, since it was a grayscale image, it looks very similar. But if I click in the gradient to bring up the Gradient Editor, I can add a color stop by clicking underneath the gradient. Then we can double click on that stop to bring up the color picker. So if I wanted to, say, add a red tint to this image, I can do so. Now, because the brightness value that I chose was at 29, but I'm adding it to the location, 49, which is basically at the midtone gray, because my color or my brightness is darker, it's going to darken down the entire image. If I wanted a closer match, then I would need to increase this to 49, the same as the location. But I actually like it a little bit darker, so it's completely up to you how you want to remap the colors in your image. I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut, Command + J, in order to duplicate that gradient map. That's the same as choosing Layer New and then Layer. I'll hide the one underneath because gradient maps can also be used with the presets and they can lead to some really creative results. I'm going to scroll down to the oranges and apply Orange-06 to this image. And you can see because it goes from a medium orange to a medium pink, we're not getting all of the levels of gray in our image. If I pick Orange_09, we get something different. Here, we've got lighter values in the darker areas, so it's remapping the black to the yellow and whites to pink. Let's go ahead and choose Orange_05. Tap Enter to dismiss the preset picker. And it doesn't have to stop here. We can always change the opacity or the blend mode. Let's take a look at Linear Burn. That's pretty interesting. Or even something like Difference. So there you have it. It's as easy as that to create a color wash over an image using a gradient fill layer, or use the gradient map to remap colors in an image and add creative effects.

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