One of the coolest techniques in Adobe Photoshop is to use a gradient fade to
fade out your pictures. Now this is used a lot of times in movie posters or
boxing event posters or truly everywhere, but it's not something that
is commonly known how to do - or there's not a lot of tutorial videos or they're
kind of called something different or they're made a little bit more complex
than I think you need. So in this video we are going to do the really simple gradient
fade effect. So if I look over here I just want to show you a couple of examples of
how this is already being used. So for instance if we look at this picture - this
character for the movie - notice that the picture eventually fades out into
another picture. Same thing with this picture of the ship, it fades out
around the edges to fade into this particular picture as well. If we move over
here we can see each of these main characters their photos will fade out so
that we can end up seeing this smash. For the Shutter Island poster we see that
gradient fade effect happening here and also here with the
actual Shutter Island it fades up into the other photo of Leonardo DiCaprio. If we
look at a boxing poster we can see this from side to side instead of up and down,
well actually we can see the up and down right here but we can add a gradient
fade this way as well. So in order to do this what we need to do is first select
a picture now you can have multiple pictures in your document if you open a
picture from scratch you just have to make sure to unlock that layer so that
you can add a layer mask to it and you can do this to as many pictures as you
want in your composition for now what I want to do is I want to create a book
cover and this is about the blood countess Elizabeth Bathory. I don't have
anywhere to add the title and the name of the author and the subtitle that kind
of explains what the book is about but we love this photo. How then can we make
it so that we can fit it somewhere? Well the top of her head is already cut off so
we want to leave it up there, down here this is probably the least important
part of the picture but even if we try to put our text if I turn on the text
that I've already created here, it's really hard to see it, so what we need to do is we're
going to use the gradient fade
to fade out a portion of this picture to give us space for the
actual text. Now I also have a solid fill color background and this is an easy way
for me to change the background color and see what I like so that is the first
layer above it you should have your photo and then you can have text if you
need to. So in order to do the gradient fade effect what we're gonna do is
click on our photo layer, add a layer mask, and notice that the layer mask is all
white. We're gonna then grab the gradient tool and if you hover over it
you can hit "G" on your keyboard to get to the gradient tool and it's important that
you select the right gradient. Click on the gradient selector box and it'll ask
you to choose from one of the presets. The one we want is usually the second
one in the list if you hover over it it's called foreground to transparent, now you
might not have black to transparent, mine is black to transparent because my
foreground color is black, whatever your foreground color is it'll show up here.
In order to make this work we actually want it to be black but if yours isn't
right now it's ok, just click on foreground to transparent, come over here to
foreground color and change it to black. The reason why we're gonna do this is
because we're gonna use the gradient tool not on the photo but on the mask that's on
the photo so that we can hide portions of the photo using that mask without
actually erasing it. So click on the layer mask for this photo, grab our
gradient tool and I'm just gonna start from the bottom and click and drag up.
You can choose how far you want it to go, it can be short, it can be tall, but I'm gonna go
ahead and do about halfway up the page and just see what it looks like. If you
like it, keep it ,if you don't hit Cmd or Ctrl + Z and try it again.
If I start later...up on the page
notice that it's all black down here now and it's gonna fade into the photo I
don't like that either so I'm probably gonna start a little bit above the
bottom and I probably want to go to about her chin and see if that works for me.
so I can turn turn on my text and see if that works. If I want to
actually make this more solid color instead of the photo I can undo that
mask if I want to, delete that layer mask or I can just come back here and paint a
new mask. So that gives me a much better area or space to put my text in. It's really
easy to see but we can still have this full, beautiful image.
The last thing for us to do is change the background color to
whatever we want, so by having the solid fill color layer I can choose black, I
can choose red, I can do whatever I need to do. Obviously those look hideous
because I like the black one and that's the one I chose; and then we can do final
things like we can add a gradient map to turn it black and white we can even
reverse that gradient map to come up with something cool, but the whole point
of this was to show you that gradient fade effect. You can do this with all
different types of gradients, if I were to delete this layer mask and add it back
in I can come over here and choose the radial gradient and I can click and drag
out now once I do that if I went the opposite way I can undo it and either I
can choose reverse on the gradient or instead of moving from the inside out I
can move my gradient from the outside in.
So I think I need to reverse that and I want to keep her face in there so
there's a nice radial gradient using that gradient fade effect.