In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to create a realistic rainbow using the new
gradient. Even if you don't need to create a rainbow, I urge you to check out this tutorial
because there's so many features and things inside of the new gradientsthat apply to everything that
we do. The first thing we're going to do is grab a gradient, and then what we want to do is do a
circular gradient. We're just going to click and drag. Right now, what we're doing is just
a foreground to background. Let's change the type of gradient we're working in. Under the gradient,
go down and choose Legacy Gradients. There's an entire hidden library of gradients. Let me show
you how to get them. Open up the Gradients panel, if it's not already opened. Choose the hamburger
menu and you'll see Legacy Gradients. This will add a ton of different gradient libraries
to your Photoshop. Now under the Legacy Gradients, you're going to see we could use either of these
two, but let's grab this particular one, the Spectrum one, and this is what we're going to
use for our rainbow. Now, let's make it a little bit larger, and I'm just going to drag the center.
What we're going to do is we are going to control the spacing of the color
as well as custom transparency to get us what we're looking for. So if you look
under the properties panel, this is where we can control a lot of the things inside the gradient.
So if you roll down, what we're essentially going to be looking at here is these two stops. We've
got the color stop here, and then we've got the capacity controls. So what we want to do is get
these colors closer to each other so that the colors are in the outer band. So we can drag
with the yellow. Notice as I do that, it gets a little closer. Let's drag all these colors in.
The green, the blues. Now, we want to go even further than this, though, but notice it's
getting quite difficult because these are really close together. Let me show you a great tip. Pull
out the properties panel. Now, watch this. As we drag, look at this, we can elongate this slider.
And as you can see, we have control over the colors and the opacity in a really nice way now.
And if you're getting any value out of this video, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications.
You won't miss any of my videos. I'm just going to hit the space bar and just drag this down so
we can see it underneath. All right, let's look at the opacity control. We can hit any one one of
these and if we look underneath, we can see the opacity is zero. That makes it transparent.
Now, if we go here, we can see there's an 80 % and then there's 100 % capacity.
What I'm going to do is I'm just going to tear these off
and let's pull this zero on the other side. Now, notice as I pull this up, notice this is
going from the center. The right-hand side is the center, the left hand side is the outer rings of
here. What we're doing is essentially setting the area that we want the transparency to go.
Maybe we want to go from here to there. Now, of course, this little one here will control
the blending. See how that can change the way that blends. I'm just going to ditch this one
altogether. What we're going to do is just go for 100 % capacity in the middle for now,
and then we're going to have this blend off into the transparent areas.
Nice. What we need to do, though, is we need to concentrate these a little
bit more. Let's pull the yellow in a little bit, get it closer.
We want to do a thinner rainbow. Now, depending on how thick you want this rainbow,
you'll have these colors either closer or further apart. Look at this.
Now, I feel for this to be accurate, this color here, let's double click this blue
to bring the color picker. Let's just go for a little bit more into the purples
because I feel like that's a little more realistic what you would see in a rainbow.
It looks like the yellow is a little bit white. Let's bring that green in a little bit closer.
Another thing, notice how this is blending. We can make this look a lot better from changing
the method from linear. Let's go to Perceptual and see how now we get a much smoother blend,
more realistic. And let me just pull that in a little bit, so a little more red there.
Now, if you ever look at a rainbow, one of the things you'll notice,
the inside of the rainbow is generally a little bit lighter.
The sky, because it acts like a lens. The outside of the sky will be darker than the inside. So why
don't we do that? So what we're going to do is right here where we have this pink, we're going
to add another stop, double click it to open the color, and we're going to choose white.
Now, notice it's not doing anything yet. But if we take this particular one
and change the opacity instead of being zero, look at this, see how that will fill it in? Obviously,
we're not going to go like that. But what we're going to do is take it down to just a small amount
maybe just 3 or 4 %. In fact, I'm just going to drag this stop right off it. Now,
this other stop, let's just change this to white.
Let's just drop these properties down and just dock it again in here.
Now, we have the ability to increase the scale. See, we can make this thing really, really large,
and we can use this point to reposition it.
You can make it smaller, have the whole rainbow just going across the sky here if you wanted to.
I think what we'll do in this case is let's make it larger
and we're just going to have it going across the one side. All right, once you've applied that
rainbow, we probably want to save it so we don't have to create it again. We're going to go under
the properties panel under Presets, we're going to click and we're going to call this one rainbow.
Click OK. Now that's saved and we can reuse it in other documents. Let's look at how we can blend
this into the image. The first thing we want to do is we want to just go onto the mask here and
we want to have this fade into the area it's going to hit. We're just going to grab another gradient
and this time we're going to grab the foreground and background, just
black to white gradient. Make sure that we change this to a linear gradient. There we
go. It looks like it's going the wrong way. No problem, just flip it around
and see how we can just blend this in how we want it to just land.
Now, we could use blending modes on this gradient if we wanted o something like a Screen Mode
or just use whatever blending modes you want.
If we want to get rid of it up here, let's grab a brush, let's make it a soft brush. Remember,
we still have the lighter area in there. We're just going to paint with that black brush.
Of course, the nice thing about this gradient, if it's not quite what you want,
you can always grab the gradient tool, you can click on it. We can go back under these Presets,
and maybe you want a little bit more red there or you want to bring that transparency. Let's
bring it in a little bit there. Look at that. See how you can just tweak all of this afterwards.
Here's another little trick just to smoothen out your rainbow. Why don't we go on the layer,
right click, and then we're going to convert it to a Smart Object. Now we can apply filters
to it and we're going to give it a blur. Let's choose Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.
Notice as we give it a little bit of blur, we can soften it and make it look more realistic.
Let me know in the comments underneath if you learned anything new in this tutorial. Also,
don't forget to check out part 1 where I'm showing you how to do the floating heads
like you would see in Hollywood movie posters and stuff using the gradient inside of masks.
Check out that tutorial right there. And if you're new to the cafe, welcome. Hit the
subscribe button, turn on notification, and you won't miss any of my tutorials. Until next time,
I'll see you at the cafe.