Gradients vs Gradient Maps

hello blade grid is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 leet and today I want to answer a good question that I received recently which is what is the difference between a gradient and a gradient map both of them are very effective for our images but they're both used in very different ways they are not the same thing and we're going to discover that today all right so in this tutorial we're going to talk about gradient and I want to talk about three gradients that you can use in your workflow as you're going in Photoshop and the differences between them okay so we have the gradient tool we have the gradient adjustment layer and we have the gradient map and all of them can be used in different ways so the first thing I want to talk about is the gradient tool the actual tool that you have for making gradients and over here on the left hand side you're going to see that we have a gradient tool mine is coupled with the paint bucket yours might not be in there and if it isn't what you're going to want to do is you're going to come over here and say edit toolbar and look for the extra tools if you have that in the extra tools you can this is where you can move and modify your tools in Photoshop CC so you can kind of put things exactly where you want them to be in your toolbar so mine happens to be right underneath the paint bucket and gradient tool so the gradient tool well just some things that you need to know about the gradient tool before we begin here the gradient tool is just like a paintbrush if I were to go like this and drag and click and drag it's going to make a graduated gradient on my image but look at it it's on my photograph there's nothing I can do about that right now so what I would need to do in this case is I would need to make a new layer a whole new layer just for my grading and that's because I don't want to just slap this gradient on there it's not going to look right okay so with the gradient tool it's got all the different settings up here that go from your blend modes from normal all the way through luminosity just like you would see over here with your blend modes however I prefer to keep it on its own separate layer so that the blend modes can be controlled right here instead of a here here you have your different types of gradients you have your linear gradient which is probably going to be your most used you have a radial gradient you have an angled gradient and you have reflected and diamond diamond I kind of think is worthless unless you're working with text reflected almost worthless unless you're working with text angle gradient I have never really felt a need for it your main primary ones for photography are going to be right here with your radial gradient and your linear gradient however I'm sure that somebody on YouTube is going to try and prove me wrong so what we're going to do here is just click and drag and press and hold shift that'll maintain it from the center so you don't get this wonky gradient that goes off to the left to the right press and hold shift and it comes in from the center so now we can change the blending modes here to something like soft light or overlay and you can see with that really quick gradient we got a really nice effect on our image because we change the blend mode when it's set to normal it's just like a swash of pinkish Brown on top of our image but when we set the blend mode to something like soft light it can help amplify these colors based off of this color here however the problem that I see with this is that this is a single layer and it's like a brush so if you were to try and change the color of this it wouldn't quite work out so there's a better option and that better option is to actually go in and use a gradient if you were to select gradient from here a little bit more confusing because now you have to if to decide where you want your gradient to be but this allows us to rotate our gradients so if we move it this way you're going to see that our gradient is going to come in from the right we move it this way our gradient is going to come in from the top we move it this way our gradients going to come in from the left and again you can press and hold shift to make sure that you are moving at I think it's 15 degree increments okay so we'll just have it come in from the top like this your scale is going to change the size of that gradient and at any point you can click and you can move that gradient up and down that's why I kind of prefer this method by using a gradient fill as opposed to using the gradient that is over here with the gradient tool so if we were to drop you know the scale of this if we bring the scale down to one it's a very slight feather so this scale is actually working on the feather of this moving up so we'll move that feather on up to about 45 and that should be good and we can move that about right here if you wanted to you can reverse this gradient so the effect is now on the bottom rather than on the top but it's really not that big of a deal in this case if we were to press ok and change this blend mode now into soft light like you saw before it looks beautiful we get a nice little effect here but at any time if you want to edit this gradient maybe you want to change the color because you're not really fan of the the way this beautiful pinkish Brown is affecting our image you can double click this gradient fill and you can click inside this gradient and change it to any of the gradients that you have in your tool set here so what I would suggest is to keep it on this transparent one because basically what this is saying is that this is going from from this pinkish Brown to a transparent nothing okay and that's a good gradient to have because it doesn't make doesn't mean you have to have two colors you can just have one color and have that gradient come in as you see fit so if we were to click on this color we could change this gradient to any color that we want to match our image and to get the look in the field that we want if use the gradient as a tool though and you tried to do this you wouldn't be able to pick your color whenever you want so the reason why I prefer the gradient adjustment layer over the gradient tool is that at any time I could come in and I can change my gradient so this is changing the color of my gradient as it comes in as a wash so that's the basics of the gradient tool and the gradient still there's many things you can do with the grieving Phila suggest you experiment with it but with this or just talking about the differences between the gradient tool the gradient fill and now the gradient map so I'm gonna go and delete this beautiful little grading we had there I was starting to get used to how that looked on my image I'm going to go ahead and go down here to where it says gradient map now when I click gradient map look what happens my whole image turns like this pinkish brown to white and why is that well that's because over here on the left hand side my default colors are set to this brownish color and white so if I were to press B I could default those back to black and white and now if I were to press gradient map look what happens now we have a black and white image the heck is going on here well the gradient map is an awesome tool because what it actually does it maps out the color value in our image to the tone or the color that we want to set it to in this case we're setting it to tone because if we look at this gradient with this is say okay everything over here which mind you is zero pixel value all the way over to here which is 255 pixel values so anything between 0 and 255 I want you to tune to turn this black color if you're 0 if you're a mid tone I want you to be this grayish color and if you're a highlight or a white I want you to be this color white all right what what happens if we change it to this gradient now look what happens we go from this purplish magenta to a nice creamish tone and here's the same here and here and here and we can keep changing this to whatever we want it to be for whatever gradient we want to use looking at this you can change this gradient at any time so let's say you wanted this gradient to be this one you could change these colors by clicking on the the gradient that you have selected here and clicking on this gradient and selecting any color you want for those dark areas typically I say it's best to make your dark areas dark a darkish color that you want to transition to and your light areas a lightish color that you want transition to this one actually looked which one was it this one looked pretty interesting because this can actually give us a nice sunset look so I'll press ok however it doesn't look like a sunset right now because now we have to mix this gradient map with a blend mode so we have this blend mode set to something like soft light or overlay look what happens to our background and look what happens to our foreground we get this really vibrant kind of look in our image again we can just drop that opacity and shape this image how we want to with that gradient map so for the sake of discussion here what we can we can discuss the two main gradients ok the gradient tool and the gradient adjustment are kind of the same thing because they work in the same fashion you drag it down and it does something to your photograph ok so let's talk about the gradient ok the gradient tool or the gradient adjustment layer is a gradient that you can put on your image that so no matter what color or tone about it it's just going to be like a wash almost like you take a roller and just roll paint on your image okay the gradient map actually maps out the color values from 0 to 255 and replaces them with whatever gradient you have selected so that's why this image looks black and white in the beginning because we're mapping out all of the color values to the gradient of black to white now we're mapping out all the values in our image from a a kind of like a reddish color to an orangish color or a red orange to a yellow orange color both of them are very valuable tools and both of them can actually be used in unison if we look at this image look at the gradient here okay we like that gradient it looks good but look we have a mask here what if we don't want this gradient to affect what's happening down below that's where we can use the gradient tool with that gradient tool sit to this black to transparent and we can make a mask on here right on this layer we can just use that tool and boom now look what happens we're actually using the gradient tool on a gradient map because that gradient tool is now masking out the bottom area of our image in a graduated way that as it moves on up it's feathers that effect into the top okay so they can be used in unison together and while I have said that the gradient tool might not be the best for applying a gradient to your image it's one of the best tools for applying a gradient mask to any adjustment layer that you have in your image main takeaways here a gradient as it stands will just be a wash of color over your image a gradient map will map out the tones based on a gradient that you select again my name is Blake Curtis with f/64 Academy and f/64 lead if you liked it please comment share and tell a friend and if you haven't already please subscribe and turn on the little notification icon so that whenever I update a new video on my youtube channel you'll get an email for it and better yet if you go to f/64 it's academy.com and sign up to the email list every time I have new content on the website you'll get it in your email because sometimes there's things I put on the website that I don't put on YouTube I just want to thank you for taking the time to watch this tutorial and expand your brain with your creative pursuits [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 51,837

Keywords: Gradient Map, Gradient Fill, Photoshop, Adjustment Layers, Gradients explained, how to use gradients in Photoshop

Id: XDMs8n923Gk

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017