How to create textured blended gradients in Photoshop | Tutorial

hey everyone joe hearst of joehost.com here today i've got a really quick and simple tutorial for you where you can create these kinds of color meshes and gradient blends for things like social media twitter instagram facebook etc stay tuned to the end because i've got a couple little extra tricks that will give these some additional oomph and really give them some punch and impact so let's hop on over to the computer and get going alrighty guys so we're gonna go ahead and jump straight into photoshop here let's go ahead and create a new project here i'm going to make it 1080 by 1080 so that is one zero eight zero by one zero eight zero resolution you can keep at 72 dpi or 72 pixels per inch i personally prefer 90 for things like social media posts and web content however 72 dpi is the standard um but taking into account people are viewing things on cell phones mobile phones um high-end desktop cinema displays etc i like to just go for 90 uh leaving the colors at rgb 8-bit with the background color of white and we'll just leave everything else as default and hit create first things first if you're on pc or mac hit control or command and then the r key that's going to toggle your rulers on or off you're going to want to have them on and pull out from the left here and it should just snap straight into the center we're going to pull down here and it's going to snap straight into the center as well forgive the tool tips this is the first time i've actually installed photoshop on this pc press b on the keyboard to bring up your brushes which you'll see right there we want to go ahead up here to the top left and make sure that our hardness is set to zero and drag that slider all the way down to zero i want to be at around about 300 pixels slightly larger you can use the square bracket keys on your keyboard either the open square bracket key to decrease size or the close square bracket key to increase the size so i'm going to have mine right about there right over actually yeah right about there at 400 and i'm going to kill ahead and pick a see probably a teal color here so that teal looks a little bright to me let's go and darken it just a touch i'm gonna press shift ctrl and n to create a new layer on mac it would be shift and command n and i'm just going to call this color 1 background layer i'm going to hit ctrl j or command j to duplicate i'm gonna delete that one and we're just gonna keep this white one here we'll keep it visible for now so selecting our color one i'm gonna go ahead and just brush roughly about a quarter it doesn't matter if it's too much or too little but you want to kind of just put it within the grid lines that we uh marked out so again shift control and n for november color 2 and i'm going to pick something around the the neon sort of hot pinkish that looks pretty good to me and i'm going to just brush this in over here obviously you can change your brush size to get different uh effects here suppose i want to just creep up the side a little bit there fill that in and another new layer we'll call that color three and i want to do something kind of teal here teal or green uh that looks good it's a little bit too fluorescent but we can always adjust that later on actually no that's quite good i like that don't be afraid to paint into your current colors as well the more you sort of get a little bit crazy with these and a little bit more random the more they'll tend to mix and do well so if you're not crazy happy with your colors try dragging them around a little bit and uh you know maybe i want to drag my pink on top of everything but i think it's okay in the middle right now the teal is a little overpowering so i'm going to try and blend the uh the pink into that but what we're going to do now is click on either your top or bottom layer here so my bottom layer is color one on my top layer is color three i want to go from my top layer hold shift click my bottom layer ctrl or command g that's gonna go ahead and group everything then i'm gonna press ctrl or command j that's going to duplicate everything now i'm going to hide the layer by clicking the eye icon here or the group i should say i'm going to hide the group then with the group that we've just duplicated you can see everything in this group here i'm going to collapse that with the arrow we're going to go ahead and press ctrl or command e that's going to flatten everything so now we just have a flat group here and we're going to go ahead and come over to the smudge tool which is right here or that will be with a blur or sharpen tool depending on what you last had selected so smudge tool and i have found that around 50 to 55 works very well for this so we're going to have normal leaving everything else on default and i'm going to increase the size just a tad here and what i'm going to do is start smudging in my pink towards the bottom left and depending on your pc and the resolution of your artwork this may take some time what i'm looking to do here is basically just try and get a little bit of fluidity and a little bit of movement uh into this here so i'm gonna try and pull up and across a little bit more it's a little bit too much i'm going to go ahead and dial the strength back just a little bit and pull this across try and create a little bit of fluidity and change the brush size here pull it out i think we have a nice shape here on this side so i'm going to try and pull this pink so i'm going to go ahead and just keep blending everything here a little bit smudging things around i'll just pull this out a little bit more okay that's looking alright to me uh what i'm going to go ahead and do is hit t for tango just to bring up the text tool and i'm going to put something like i don't know follow oops double l follow and we'll make this white the font that i'm using is called intro for those of you guys interested it is a free font control or command t to bring up our transform tools i just want to visually center this which is actually going to be a little bit off center based on the transform tool i'm going to go ahead and hit command j to duplicate the layout i was just on or in fact if i hit control z or command z and press alt on my keyboard on mac that would also be alt and hover my mouse here dragging down while holding shift i can get very precise control over this i want about a 40 pixel gap so can we quite get it there 41 pixels is fine and doing the same again holding alt and shift if i drag off of center and then hit shift you can see it toggles back to keep it in line and we want a 41 pixel gap there as well so i'm going to go ahead and hit shift selecting one of my layers here of the three on the right side for my text layers shift and click that's going to select all of them and then command or control and t and i can nudge everything up here with the arrow keys i think that looks good and then for the center one here i'm just going to adjust this to the [Music] was there not an intro variant yes there is there's an intro inline there we go adjust that to intro inline it would be nice if i had a stroke variant as well um but we don't so that's not an issue in fact you know what i'm going to change it to the word flow instead of follow i think that pairs well with what we actually have on the screen uh so control and semicolon will get rid or display your ruler grid markings and also control or command apostrophe will display your grid depending on whether you're on pc or mac you can toggle those on or off just helps you visually align things all right that's looking good to me so i'm going to hit make sure that i've got one of my font layers selected either the top or the bottom one holding shift and click i'm going to press ctrl or command g depending on mac or pc yet again and that's going to group everything i'm just going to hide those for now and go back to my original um shape i guess and color copy and i'm going to go up to filter and blur and what this is going to do in fact if i zoom in you guys will probably get a slightly better representation of this you can see that there's a lot of stepping in this because it's not particularly the smoothest way to blend everything by using the blur tool and the smudge tool i'm sorry the smudge tool not the blur at all so what i'm going to do is go ahead and scroll out a touch actually we'll stay zoomed in just so that you guys can see so filter blur i want to pick gaussian blur here and 1080 by 1080 i think four pixels a little bit too much two and a half pixels looks good to me it sort of gets rid of that stepping but it doesn't quite fully remove it we want just a touch of stepping where there's an ever so slight hard edge between the colors and where they change for the next little quick tip so we're going to go back to filter and noise add noise and this is where it adds a whole new dimension to everything so you can see where this step is here it starts to blend it in but it adds a bunch of noise to the edges here gives it that kind of spray paint grungy but also textured feel so three percent looks good to me um zoom out here if i just alt press alt and uh left click we can zoom out uh monochromatic looks good it sort of has a little bit of sharpness gaussian is also good uniform is not quite giving me the result i want so i think zoom into about 100 here and display our text that's not looking too bad okay so what i'm going to go ahead and do is fill my window making sure that on the right hand side here i have group 2 which is my text layer which i'm going to rename text and i'm going to go ahead and hit hit control j or command j which is going to copy that for me again everything is inside i am going to hit ctrl or command e to flatten everything and i'm going to drag it behind my text layer for now now i'm going to hide my text layer click on the fx panel down here at the bottom and i'm going to pick a color overlay black is absolutely fine normal is okay i'm going to hit ok and then i'm going to go and toggle my text back on making sure i have the text that we've just selected or just recreated underneath our text layer here in the folders or the group make sure i have that selected ctrl t or command t i'm going to nudge it down and left just a few pixels to where it's just starting to give it a little bit of impact here through the text as you can see it's looking super retro-y kind of 80s maybe late 80s mid 80s phil i don't really want to give it that kind of feel i want to give it more of a modern but kind of grungy texturey feel so instead of having this hard edge of everything we're going to go up to filter blur yet again and we're going to add a gaussian blur and since we're on a color overlay it's a little tricky to see this so you're going to want to use the actual artwork that you have i find that having preview mode if you don't have it toggled on is probably best for this and i'm going to give it quite a bit of a gaussian blur probably around four and a half ish pixels maybe more about four pixels somewhere in the low fours that looks good okay so now i'm gonna pull back the opacity i'm gonna zoom in a little bit for this as well because i don't want there to be a whole lot of punch for this but i also want to give it a little bit of impact the high 30s looks good to me i'm just going to toggle this on and off yeah high 30s looks good to me okay now with that taken care of we're going to go ahead over to the rectangle tool making sure that our fill color is strike through up here with the red line so that we don't have a fill color and we have a stroke of 12 pixels you can go ahead and click in this box here and assign 12 pixels by just typing in 12 and make sure that we have a solid stroke now i'm just going to hold shift and drag out so that it's somewhat square and then release my left click that looks good to me press v on my keyboard to bring up my freedom slash move control tool which is up here and with my rectangle selected i'm going to press ctrl t and then i'm going to press ctrl semicolon or it would be command on mac and i'm going to just nudge this over slightly and nudge it up a tad and then i'm just going to adjust my box by clicking on the anchor points either in the center or the corner and if you need granular control by adjusting a specific length of something you can hold shift so i'm just going to hold shift and drag here a couple times and i think i want to make this just a tiny bit wider and then again using my arrow keys i'm going to refine it so that it's visually balanced then with my rectangle that i just made selected on my layers panel i'm going to go ahead and hit command or ctrl j drag it below so what i'm going to do now after i've dragged that below is effects color overlay black i'm going to hide this layer again and i'm going to press ctrl or command t nudging it down and left ever so slightly then bringing back the original and nudging it down and left a tad more that's looking good and with the black version that we have selected this one right here we're gonna go back up to filter blur gallery sorry blur and we're going to go for a gaussian blur yes we need to rasterize that before we can do it because it's currently a smart object and 4.2 is the same as our text that we rasterized and adjusted and i believe it was around 32 percent so i'm just going to type in 32 oops or 320 32 that's quite good i just want to double check that we're actually the same as our text with that layer go there it is 37 okay so visually i want to match that and just type in 37 that looks a little bit too much gives a little bit too much emphasis to the outside so i'm actually going to step this back again to the low 30s 33 looks good to me and there we have it that is pretty much it so that about wraps it up guys if you try this for yourself go ahead and post them to instagram and at me at joehurstdesign i'd love to see what you guys have come up with provide you any feedback or answer any questions anything else leave it down in the comments below i'll see you guys next time and if you want to stay tuned for more design tips and tricks on a freelance basis go ahead and hit that subscribe button i will catch you guys next time

Channel: Joe Hirst

Views: 9,604

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, gradient, create gradient in photoshop, texture gradient photoshop, make blended gradient photoshop, how to blend gradient, photoshop gradient tutorial, photoshop gradient lesson, how to make gradietns, make gradient in photoshop, photoshop, tutorial, photoshop tutorial 2021, graphic design, adobe photoshop, how to, photoshop tutorials, adobe photoshop 2020, gradients photoshop, adobe photoshop tutorial, photoshop cc, graphic design tutorials for beginners

Id: cgMBg7CIDvA

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021