Digital Darkroom: Colour Gradients

Friday, October 17th, 2008 | Filed under Lessons

Today we’re taking a look at a basic darkroom technique that can help you greatly in setting a mood for your images – be it in photography or photomanipulation.

If you want to “tag along”, the picture I’ll be using is available on my stock account over at dA (it’s the picture with the number 2):

The first thing you’ll need to do is pick a foreground colour. Don’t worry too much about which colour you choose just yet, it doesn’t really matter at this stage. I usually use the colour picker to choose something from the image. You can choose whatever you like, just do not choose pure black or white and it makes things easier if it’s not a solid grey either. Use the Gradient Tool (hidden behind the Fill Tool/”Bucket”) to add a Gradient from solid colour to transparent (it’s the second of the default gradients) on the part of the pic you want to affect:

Set the Gradient layer to “Soft Light” or “Overlay” – these are called “Blend Modes” and can be accessed through the drop down menu in the Layers Palette that is by default set to “Normal”. For this excercise I believe I started with “Soft Light”, but later chose to set it to “Overlay” because the effect is more pronounced here. It’s up to you, really. You just have to try and see what works in your case. You can also try other blend modes, but for this tut, we’ll leave it at the two mentioned.

I didn’t like the fact that the light gradient lightened up the whole bottom part of the pic, so I used the Hue/Saturation Dialogue to change the colour the way you see in the screenshot above. The big advantage here is that you can manipulate the feeling of your piece with a live preview (instead of choosing a colour, not liking it, deleting, choosing a new one etc.).

Noteworthy: The “neutral colour” of the two blend modes we’re using here is 50 % grey. That means that a layer filled with 50 % grey set to “Soft Light” or “Overlay” will have no effect on the image at all. More Saturation will add colour to the image with the Hue you chose, but it will not just “colour it in”, but it will behave as if light with that colour were hitting your image. That is also, why lighter tones will lighten your image and darker ones will darken it.

To make the transition smoother you can do a number of things, I chose to use Edit > Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to simply drag the top part upward a little. But you could just as well use a Gaussian Blur (Image > Filter > Gaussian Blur). You can use Free Transform also to make other adjustments to your gradient – if you are using Phtoshop CS and up, you might find the Warp mode useful, too.

Lastly, I added another gradient to the top. This time a green one, so the leaves up there would have a nice contrast with the orange at the bottom.

You can add as many Gradients as you like, of course. Try using a radial one, too.
Just be careful that the effect doesn’t overpower your image.

If you have any questions or want to show me what you’ve created with these tips or just want to say Hi, feel free to leave a comment!

Tags: colour, digital darkroom, gradients, light & shadow, photomanipulation

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