Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P10

Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P10:If you are reading this foreword, it probably means that you’ve purchased a copyof Adobe Photoshop 6.0, and for that I and the rest of the Photoshop team atAdobe thank you.If you own a previous edition of the Photoshop Bible, you probably know what toexpect. If not, then get ready for an interesting trip.
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Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P10 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking 237 ✦ Gradient preview: The selected gradient appears in the gradient preview, labeled in Figure 6-9. Click the preview to open the Gradient Editor dialog box, discussed in the upcoming section “Creating custom gradations.” Gradient preview Click to display palette Gradient style icons Click for menu Figure 6-9: The Options bar gives you quick access to all the gradient tool options. ✦ Gradient drop-down palette: Click the triangle adjacent to the preview to dis- play the Gradient palette, which contains icons representing gradients in the current gradient presets. Click the icon for the gradient you want.Note In the default gradient preset, the first two gradations are dependent on the current foreground and background colors. The others contain specific colors bearing no relationship to the colors in the toolbox. You load gradient presets using the same techniques that I describe in detail in the brush preset discussion in Chapter 5. Here’s a brief recap: • Click the triangle near the top of the drop-down palette to display the palette menu. The Photoshop collection of presets and any presets that you define appear at the bottom of the palette menu. Click a preset name to use the preset instead of the current preset or append the new preset to the current one. • To append a preset from disk — such as when a coworker gives you a preset file — choose Load Gradients from the palette menu or click Load in the Preset Manager dialog box. If you want to replace the current pre- set instead, choose Replace Gradients from the palette menu or click Replace in the dialog box. To return to the default gradients, choose Reset Gradients from the palette menu, either from the Options bar palette or the one in the Preset Manager dialog box.238 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Tip You can edit a gradient and perform the aforementioned preset juggling acts from within the Gradient Editor dialog box, too. The upcoming section “Creating custom gradations” covers this dialog box. ✦ Gradient style: Click an icon to select the gradient style — a function that you formerly accomplished by choosing a specific gradient tool. The next section explains these five styles. ✦ Mode and Opacity: These options work as they do for the paint and edit tools, the Fill command, and every other tool or command that offers them as options. Select a different brush mode to change how colors are applied; lower the Opacity value to make a gradation translucent. Remember that you can change the Opacity value by pressing number keys as well as by using the Opacity control on the Options bar. Press 0 for 100 percent opacity, 9 for 90 percent, and so on. ✦ Reverse: When active, this simple check box begins the gradation with the background color and ends it with the foreground color. Use this option when you want to start a radial or other style of gradation with white, but you want to keep the foreground and background colors set to their defaults. ✦ Dither: In the old days, Photoshop drew its gradients one band at a time. Each band was filled with an incrementally different shade of color. The potential result was banding, in which you could clearly distinguish the transition between two or more bands of color. The Dither check box helps to eliminate this problem by mixing up the pixels between bands (much as Photoshop dithers pixels when converting a grayscale image to black and white). You should leave this option turned on unless you want to use banding to create a special effect. ✦ Transparency: You can specify different levels of opacity throughout a grada- tion. For example, the Transparent Stripes effect (available from the Gradient palette when the Default Gradients preset is loaded) lays down a series of alternately black and transparent stripes. But you needn’t use this trans- parency information. If you prefer to apply a series of black and white stripes instead, you can make all portions of the gradation equally opaque by turning off the Transparency check box. For example, in Figure 6-10, I applied Transparent Stripes as a radial gradation in two separate swipes, at top and bottom. Both times, I changed the Opacity setting to 50 percent, so the dog and the hydrant would never be obscured. (The Opacity setting works independently of the gradation’s built-in trans- parency, providing you with additional flexibility.) In the top gradation, the Transparency check box is on, so the white stripes are completely transpar- ent. In the bottom gradation, Transparency is turned off, so the white stripes become 50 percent opaque (as prescribed ...